Legislation Clinic

Legislation Clinic - A student in the Legislation Clinic will work for a legislator who is a lawyer, a legislative committee staffed by a lawyer, or a selected public entity involved with the legislative process and principally staffed by lawyers. A typical placement might involve working with the office of the Legislative Counsel or a committee like the Assembly Committee on the Judiciary or Senate Committee on Environmental Quality. A student will learn about statutory lawmaking and observe/participate in the lawyer's role in legislative process by assisting in crafting, analyzing, and promoting legislation, and by attending related activities such as committee hearings and floor sessions. Through the work, a student will develop his or her analytical, legal research and writing, negotiation, and advocacy skills. Placements are pre-arranged, although a student may arrange for a placement if approved by the clinic director.

Local Government Clinic - Students in the Local Government Clinic work with the General Law Team of the San Francisco City Attorney's Office or at other Bay Area city attorney offices. Interns research and write on substantive issues that range from constitutional and statutory questions about the structure of state and local government, to public meeting and disclosure requirements, to delegation of authority among federal, state, and local governments. Interns may also draft ordinances and accompany city attorneys to public meetings and hearings. The course component covers basic local government law, ethical responsibilities of lawyers who represent local governmental agencies, and legislative drafting.

Legislation Clinic -  

Hastings College of the Law, consistent with its commitment to public interest law, offers students a legislation clinic that provides an in-depth systematic study of the legislative process from a practical as well as an academic perspective. This program is available to students attending other University of California law schools as well as other selected private law schools.*

This program supplements a student's initial exposure to the subject of statutory law gained in his or her first-year statutory course. It enhances the student's basic knowledge of the legislative process and related issues the student gained by taking legislation as a first year statutory course and/or the legislative process course, a prerequisite for enrolling in the program. The program provides students with a comprehensive exposure to the dynamic aspects of the legislative process, the means by which statutory law is created. Through hands-on participation, a student has the opportunity to hone the lawyering skills of research, writing, analyzing, negotiating, and advocating. These skills are an integral part of a legislative practice, as well as a traditional practice of law.

The legislation clinic is reinforced by course work consisting of an advanced legislative process seminar and a statutory interpretation and bill-drafting seminar. These concurrent seminars provide an academic focus to the legislation clinic. In addition to developing skills, the program exposes its participants to the making of statutory law thereby providing insight regarding how law is determined in our legal system and the inter-relationship between statutory law and decisional law developed by the courts.

The program starts on the first Monday in January and is completed by the end of April. The program consists of a legislation clinical placement and concurrent enrollment in a legislative process seminar and a statutory interpretation and bill-drafting course.

Enrollment in all of the following is required:

• Legislation Clinic
• Legislative Process Seminar
• Statutory Interpretation and Bill Drafting Course

Clinical:

Prerequisite: Legislative Process or Legislation; which may be waived with permission from Professor Salerno. 32 hours of clinical experience per week Units of credit:   8 Class limit:  12 students

The centerpiece of the legislation program is a clinical placement with either the legislature or a public entity involved in the legislative process. A student who enrolls in the program is required to participate in a 32 hours per week clinical activity. Each clinic participant is directly supervised by a legislative practitioner who is an attorney, and through the weekly supervision of the instructor. While a pre-arranged clinical placement is offered, a student may arrange for his or her own clinical if approved by the instructor.

A student who participates in the program will observe the legislative process first-hand by attending committee hearings and floor sessions and assisting in the crafting and promotion of legislation. In doing so, a student has the opportunity to develop specific lawyering skills. These skills include legal research and writing through bill drafting, amendment, and analysis; negotiations, by participating in 'working a bill" through the legislative process and dealing with the various interests present when a bill is considered by the legislature; and advocacy by engaging in the coalition building necessary to promote legislation by appearing before legislative forums, including legislative committees.

In addition to developing these skills, the clinical experience will provide the student with insight about how law is determined in our legal system and the inter-relationship between statutory law, the principal source of law in our legal system, and decisional law developed by the court, the principal focus of contemporary legal education.

As part of the clinical experience, a student is also required to observe and at times participate, in a range of legislative activities. These activities include attending a policy committee hearing, a fiscal committee hearing, a budget subcommittee, a conference committee, an investigative hearing, a press conference, and an administrative agency  rule adoption proceeding.

Each student is required to keep a journal that outlines clinical work assignments, summarizes daily activities connected to the clinical placement, reports on each of the required activities, comments on the legal and procedural issues, and generally addresses the clinical experience.

A clinical placement is limited to an internship with a legislator who is an attorney, a legislative committee staffed by at least one lawyer, or a selected public entity (for example, the Legislative Counsel) connected to the legislative process and principally staffed by lawyers.

These placements may include any or all of the following:

• Legislative Counsel
• Legislative Affairs Secretary, Governor's Office
• President Pro Tempore of the Senate
• Senate Committee on Business and Professions
• Senate Committee on Environmental Quality
• Senate Committee on Education
• Senate Committee on Insurance
• Speaker of the Assembly
• Assembly Committee on Business and Professions
• Assembly Committee on Human Services
• Assembly Committee on the Judiciary
• Assembly Committee on Natural Resources
• Assembly Committee on Public Safety
• Selected investigating committees
• Individual legislators who are attorneys

The student's credit will be determined by the evaluation of the attorney who supervised the student and the completed journal.

Legislative Process Seminar

Prerequisite:  Concurrent enrollment in the legislation clinic Weekly two-hour seminars Units of credit:  2 Class limit:  12 students

The legislative experience the student gains in the clinical placement will be enhanced by required participation in an advanced legislative process seminar. The seminar will provide each student with the opportunity to reflect on his or her experience, share the experience with other clinical participants, and explore both issues arising out of the legislative process, and substantive issues of law connected to specific legislation that is a focus of the student's clinical placement. The seminar will also address the jurisprudence/"legisprudence" of statutory law and the legislative and judicial cultures; the allocation of power to enact and interpret statutes and constitutional provisions; parliamentary law and the legislative rules of procedure (including issues of justiciability); the investigative power of legislatures; the regulation of participants and ethics; the relevance of administrative law to statutory law; and the budget process and related legal issues. Other topics will be added during the semester based on student interest and the issues of the particular legislative session. Guest speakers who are participants in the legislative process will be a key element of the seminar.

Each student will be responsible for participating in all seminars and will be specifically responsible for making periodic presentations regarding his or her clinical experience. A student will be graded based on class attendance and participation, and a presentation/paper to the seminar on a selected topic relating to the legislative session.

Statutory Interpretation and Bill-Drafting Course

Prerequisite: Concurrent enrollment in the legislation clinic

Weekly lecture/small group discussion for six weeks in January/February Units of credit:  3 Class limit:  12 students

The statutory interpretation and bill-drafting seminar will address these inter-related topics. It will simultaneously focus on the issues connected to interpreting statutes and the need for clear and precise legal writing when drafting statutes. The seminar will explore contemporary statutory interpretation literature and will require students to read and discuss leading articles and cases that raise issues of statutory interpretation. Specifically, the seminar will examine the role of the court in construing statutes and topical issues such as the controversy surrounding the use of legislative history, extrinsic aids, and the 'plain meaning" approach to statutory construction. An examination of the importance of the initial interpretation of a statute by an administrative agency responsible for its implementation will also be considered. The seminar will examine the canons of statutory construction.

The seminar will also focus on the professional skills necessary for competent legislative research and writing skills connected to bill drafting. This will be accomplished by studying time-honored literature on the subject (selected reading of Karl Llewellyn, and from Legislative Drafting by Dickerson) and more contemporary sources (Legal, Legislative, and Rule Drafting in Plain English by Martineau and Salerno, Legislation and Statutory Interpretation, by Eskridge, Frickey, and Garrett, and A Matter of Interpretation by Scalia, et. al). The course includes 'hands on" practice of bill and amendment drafting the student undertakes as part of his or her clinical placement and also in the form of assigned drafting exercises. Legislative practitioners and an instructor with years of experience drafting statute will supervise these drafting activities.

*Non-UC Hastings students

This program is offered to students enrolled at selected law schools. A student who is accepted into the program will concurrently be accepted to UC Hastings College of the Law for the semester that the student is in the program. Credits for the courses will be transferred to the student's home institution. It is the student's responsibility to obtain approval from his or her home institution to enroll at Hastings and participate in the Legislation Clinic. 

Inquires:

For further information concerning the program email Professor Salerno.　

Local Government Clinic -

The Local Government Clinic offers Hastings students a unique opportunity to extern at City Attorney and County Counsel offices, for credit, in the Bay area while taking a Hastings course to support this work.

When: Spring Semester only.

Who: Open to 4^th, 5^th, or 6^th semester students.

Credit and Grading: 5 units:  1 unit graded, non-GPA class component and 4 unit fieldwork component, graded pass-fail. (This course may also be taken for 4 units: 1 unit graded and 3 units for fieldwork. This option requires the approval of the instructor).

Prerequisites or Co-requisites: Constitutional Law I and either State and Local Government Law OR California Local Government Law.  With the instructor’s permission one or both of the prerequisites may be satisfied by a course directly relevant to a specific placement, for example, Labor Law (for a placement with the Labor Team), Land Use or Environmental Law (for a placement with the Land Use team, for example) or Administrative Law (for a placement with a regulatory agency, like the PUC). 

Classroom Component: Meets for one to two hours weekly for a total of 13 hours, and covers advanced topics in state and local government law and ethics relevant to the placements, along with skills training that will enable students to perform outstandingly in their placements (e.g. advanced legal writing, applied legal research) and to maximize the externship’s educational value (critical reflection, learning from feedback, networking techniques, e.g.)  The classroom component requires regular reading assignments, several short writing assignments and a journal.  It is graded, but the grade is not included in students’ GPAs. 

Fieldwork Component: For 4 credit hours--the minimum requirement is 12 weeks at the placement site for 16 hours each week. For 3 credit hours--the minimum requirment is 12 weeks at the placement site for 12 hours each week. (Please note that these are the Hastings minimums. Students are expected to work with their supervisors at their placement sites to agree upon the actual time expectations.) The placement must be at one of the approved placement sites (see below).  The fieldwork component is graded pass-fail; a passing grade requires two individual meetings with the instructor and timely submission of timesheets and also factors in mid-semester evaluations, final evaluations and the student’s own assessment of their experience in the final placement evaluation. 

To enroll in the Local Government Clinic:

• Identify the offices where you are interested in externing.  Each office has its own deadlines and requirements, some of which are described below.  If Hastings students have externed in an office in the past, the Center for State and Local Government Law can provide you with evaluations of the placement.
• Contact Rachel Goodman in the Center for State and Local Government Law at goodmanr@uchastings.edu to let us know the offices where you are interested in externing;
• Apply to the office or offices where you are interested in externing.
• Once you have accepted an offer from a placement, notify Rachel Goodman in the Center for State and Local Government Law and you will be given approval to enroll through WebAdvisor. 

Approved City Attorney’s Offices

San Francisco 

Website: http://www.sfcityattorney.org/index.aspx?page=16

Instructions: Send a cover letter, resume, and brief writing sample to Marisa Moret, Managing Attorney,

City Hall, Room 234, 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place, San Francisco, CA 94102. Applications submitted by email or fax will not be considered.

Spring 2012 Deadline: October 17, 2011.

Contact: Ms. Laurel Turner, Managing Attorney, 415-554-4727

What are the teams in the SF City Attorney's Office?

Attorneys in the San Francisco City Attorney's Office are organized into teams based on practice areas. We encourage intern candidates to state a team preference in their cover letter, however, final assignments are based on office needs. Internships may be available on any of the following teams:

• Airport (located at SFO)
• *Child Protection and Family Services*
• *Code Enforcement*
• *Construction*
• *Complex Litigation*
• Energy and Telecommunications
• Ethics and Elections
• Finance and Real Estate
• *Government*
• Government Oversight and Transaction
• Health
• *Labor*
• Land Use
• *Litigation*
• Port (located at Pier 1 in San Francisco)
• Public Utilities
• Taxation
• Transportation
• *Workers' Compensation*

[*The Local Government Externship program’s focus is on planning and advisory work; the curriculum is not designed to support litigation placements.  Students interested in externing with a team marked with asterisks, whose primary focus is litigation, should contact Rachel Goodman at the Center for State and Local Government Law for further information]

Alameda

Website: http://www.cityofalamedaca.gov/City-Hall/CC-City-Attorney

Instructions: Submit a resume, cover letter, and writing sample to Donna Mooney by mail to the Office of the City Attorney, 2263 Santa Clara Avenue, Room 280, Alameda, CA 94501 or by email to dmooney@ci.alameda.ca.us.

Spring 2012 Deadline: Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis until the start of the semester.

Contact: Ms. Donna Mooney, Acting City Attorney, 510-747-4750

Berkeley

Website: http://www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/attorney

Instructions: Submit a resume, cover letter, and writing sample by email to attorney@cityofberkeley.info.

Spring 2012 Deadline: Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis, but ideally should be submitted by

October 31, 2011.

Contact: Ms. Sarah Reynoso, Assistant City Attorney, 510-981-6984

(Note: If Ms. Reynoso is unavailable, direct questions to her assistant, Ms. Joanna Rudy, 510-981-6998.)

Hayward

Website: Hayward City Attorney

Instructions: Email a resume and cover letter describing your interest in local government to Michael Lawson at Michael.Lawson@hayward-ca.gov.

Spring 2012 Deadline: Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis.

Contact: Mr. Michael Lawson, City Attorney, 510-583-4455

Oakland

Website: http://www.oaklandcityattorney.org/home.html

Instructions: Submit a resume, cover letter, and writing sample, either by mail to the Office of the City

Attorney, City Hall, One Frank H. Ogawa Plaza, 6th Floor, Oakland, California 94612, Attention: Mary

Miles or by email to msmiles@oaklandcityattorney.org.

Spring 2012 Deadline: Students are recommended to submit their applications a month or more in

advance of their desired start date. Positions are made available according to the needs of the office.

Contact: Ms. Mary Miles, Executive Assistant to the Chief Assistant City Attorney, 510-238-3601

Palo Alto

Website: http://city.palo-alto.ca.us/depts/aty/default.asp

Melissa.tronquet@cityofpaloalto.org. It is preferred that students intern 16 hours per week and are available on Mondays (staff meeting days). If students cannot be available on Mondays other arrangements can be made.

Spring 2012 Deadline: Applications are reviewed on a first-come, first-served basis.

Contact: Ms. Melissa Tronquet, Senior Deputy City Attorney, 650-329-2171

Sacramento

Website: http://www.cityofsacramento.org/cityattorney

Instructions: Email a resume, cover letter, and writing sample to Kathleen Rogan at

KRogan@cityofsacramento.org. Interns are required to work a minimum of 16 hours per week.

Spring 2012 Deadline: November 1, 2011

Contact: Ms. Kathleen Rogan, Senior Deputy City Attorney, 916-808-5346

San Jose

Website: San Jose City Attorney

Instructions: Email a resume, cover letter, and writing sample to Ellen Donnelly at

ellen.donnelly@sanjoseca.gov. Both 2L and 3L students are welcome to apply, although 3L students are

preferred.

Spring 2012 Deadline: TBD, check the internship program website above for updates.

Contact: Ms. Ellen Donnelly, Senior Legal Analyst, 408-535-1900

San Mateo

Website: http://www.ci.sanmateo.ca.us/

Instructions: Submit a resume, cover letter, transcript, and references through Hastings Careers Online

www.hastingscareersonline.com.

Spring 2012 Deadline: Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis. Check

www.hastingscareersonline.com for updates.

Vallejo

Website: http://www.ci.vallejo.ca.us/

Instructions: Email a resume, writing sample, three references, and a cover letter (describing your interest in local government and indicating a preference to work in one of the Office’s specialties: transactions, ordinances, and litigation) to Claudia Quintana at cquintana@ci.vallejo.ca.us with a CC to sue@ci.vallejo.ca.us. Spring 2012 Deadline: Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis.

Contact: Ms. Claudia Quintana, Assistant City Attorney, 707-648-4545

As of Spring 2011, these offices do not have the capacity for interns:

• Concord
• Daly City
• Fremont
• San Rafael
• Santa Clara

Approved County Counsel's Offices

Marin

Website: http://www.co.marin.ca.us/depts/CL/main/index.cfm

Instructions: Email a resume, cover letter addressed to Mr. Patrick K. Faulkner, County Counsel, and writing sample to Jeanine Michaels at jmichaels@co.marin.us.

Spring 2012 Deadline: Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis.

Contact: Ms. Jeanine Michaels, Administrative Assistant to the County Counsel, 415-499-6117

San Mateo

Website: http://www.co.sanmateo.ca.us/portal/site/countycounsel

Instructions: Submit a resume and cover letter through Hastings Careers Online

www.hastingscareersonline.com.

Spring 2012: November, 2011, check www.hastingscareersonline.com for updates.

Contact: Mr. Eugene Whitlock, Deputy County Counsel, 650-363-4250

Santa Clara

Website: http://www.sccgov.org/portal/site/cco/agencychp?path=/v7/County%20Counsel,%20Office%20of%20the%20(DEP)/Employment%20Opportunities/Internships%20-%202011

Instructions: Send a resume, cover letter (describing your interest in working with local government, any relevant experience, and the practice areas in which you are most interested), the names and telephone numbers of two references, an unofficial law school transcript, and writing sample to internships@cco.sccgov.org.

Spring 2012 Deadline: December, 2011, check the internship website or www.hastingscareersonline.com

for updates.

Contact: Mr. Robert M. Coelho, Deputy County Counsel, 408-299-6942

Sonoma

Website: http://www.sonoma-county.org/counsel

Instructions: Send a resume, cover letter addressed to Ms. Jennifer C. Klein, Deputy County Counsel, transcript, writing sample, and cover letter to Sally Silveira at ssilvei1@sonoma-county.org.

Spring 2012 Deadline: Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis.

Contact: Ms. Jennifer C. Klein, Deputy County Counsel, 707-565-2421

As of Spring 2011, these offices do not have the capacity for interns:

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