Why Georgia Law?

Clinics with National Impact

The University of Georgia School of Law’s 17 different clinical and experiential learning offerings teach students about the law and being a lawyer through work on real problems in the real world. UGA Law’s externships and clinics embody the law school’s commitment to providing hands-on, purpose-driven legal education that impacts the community and beyond. http://law.uga.edu/clinics-externships-and-experiential-learning-programs

Transcript

Clinics and externships are a critical part of legal education as the University of Georgia Law School has been recognized for over 50 years. Today, we have a very robust program. We have 17 clinics and externships. 10 of those are in-house legal clinics. In the in-house legal clinics, students work directly under the supervision of full-time faculty in the service of helping a client or a community right now, and so you are learning the law that you need to apply that law in a real case.

In addition to being the Associate Dean for all the clinical programs, I also direct my own clinic. It's called the Community Health Law Partnership Clinic, or "Community HeLP" for short. Community HeLP works at the intersection of immigration status and health. So our clients include asylees, they include women in detention centers alleging medical abuse, we represent survivors of violence inside the United States and from around the world.

The Wilbanks Child Endangerment and Sexual Exploitation or "CEASE Clinic," we represent survivors of child sexual abuse, exploitation, and trafficking in a variety of legal proceedings. These are cases where there aren't those deep pockets of an entity, but we are able -- the clinic -- to provide pro bono legal services, and to assist survivors in finding that justice through the civil legal system. This CEASE Clinic is a unique opportunity for students to help victims find their voice and find that justice that they wouldn't otherwise have access to.

So I direct the First Amendment Clinic which launched in the fall of 2020. And our mission is to defend and advance expressive freedoms. So that includes freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to assemble, and the right to petition the government for grievances.

We work on issues that are relevant nationwide, such as police accountability, government transparency, freedom of the press. Those are some of the examples of the wide variety of issues that we assist folks with whether through litigation or non-litigation advocacy.

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