Community Group Advocacy and Social Change Lawyering Clinic

About the Clinic:

The Community Group Advocacy and Social Change Lawyering Clinic is designed for students seriously considering a career in social change lawyering and interested in learning how to work as effective partners with community groups. The Clinic, which is only offered in Spring semester, focuses on the range of skills and persuasive strategies that social change lawyers utilize, including: grassroots lobbying and legislation drafting, community organizing/mobilizing, community legal education and media campaigns, organizing public hearings, and occasionally impact litigation. Students work in two-person teams and are placed with Bay Area social justice lawyers or community groups to work 20 hours per week on a defined project affecting lower-income, working-class, of-color, and other marginalized communities. Collectively, the projects introduce students to the broad range of approaches to making social change and working collaboratively with community groups.

Clinical Instructor:

The Clinic is taught by Ascanio Piomelli, advisor to the Social Justice Lawyering Concentration, and an analyst and proponent of what has variously been labeled as a "democratic," "collaborative," or "rebellious" approach to social change lawyering.

Examples of Recent Projects:

• Students worked with a statewide coalition of domestic workers’ organizations to lay the groundwork for passage of a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights;
• Students worked with the San Francisco Human Rights Commission to design and organize a public hearing on “The Human Rights Impact of the War on Drugs” on San Francisco residents and communities;
• Students worked with Legal Services for Children to advise an East Bay continuation high school on how to augment or replace traditional school discipline measures with restorative justice principles and practices;
• Students worked with the Immigrant Legal Resource Center to educate a local collaborative of East Bay immigration service providers on best practices for conducting large group-processing events to help legal permanent residents complete their application to become naturalized citizens.
• Students worked with Tenants Together (a statewide tenants’ organization) and tenants in Merced, California, to draft and lobby for a just cause for eviction ordinance to prevent banks from evicting rent-paying tenants from rental housing simply because their landlord lost the property through foreclosure.

Full list of Projects from 2006-12.

Classroom Component: There are four hours of regularly scheduled seminar time per week. Discussions integrate extensive readings on different approaches to making social change and their application to students' fieldwork projects. Class meets on Mondays and Wednesdays from 1:10-3:20 p.m.

Fieldwork Component: Substantive legal areas vary each semester, as the emphasis is on assembling an array of projects with diverse approaches to effecting social change.Students will need to coordinate schedules with their class partner to ensure they have at least 10-12 regular, recurring hours each week to work together on fieldwork projects. Student teams will also schedule a regular one-hour meeting with Prof. Piomelli to discuss their field work and the weekly fieldnotes they prepare analyzing their work.

Units: Students receive 8 units. The 4-unit non-GPA class and 4-unit fieldwork component, graded pass-fail, must be taken concurrently.For students who have not taken the CJC Individual Representation Clinic, an additional 9th unit (of independent study credit) is awarded for the completion by mid-January of three short writing assignments on key readings and films from that class.

Open to: 3rd, 4th, 5th, or 6th semester students.

Prerequisites: Consent of the instructor.

Student Learning Objectives.

2012 Course Syllabus.

To enroll: Please email, cjc@uchastings.edu, to obtain information on the application and approval process. Spring 2013 application instructions.