Public Interest Law

Clean water, safe food and drugs, stable banks, sensible land use, an open and accessible internet-these and many more aspects of modern American life depend largely on decisions made by unelected officials staffing administrative agencies at the local, state, and federal levels. This course examines the authority and procedures that these administrative agencies use to make law, investigate violations of the law, and adjudicate the application of the law to individuals and businesses. The course raises student awareness regarding the operation of the administrative state and important separation of powers and due process questions raised by ubiquitous administrative governance.

Grading: Exam
Credits: 3
Offered: Fall/Spring

Subject Areas: Administrative and Legislative Process, Child and Family Law, Government Practice, Health Law, Public Interest Law, Business and Commercial, Criminal Law, Employment Law, Environmental Law

Students take full responsibility for representing clients under the close supervision of faculty. The course focuses on the challenges of representing real people in real matters in an ethical, reflective, and creative way. Goals include developing a critical understanding of legal process and a contextual understanding of clients’ legal problems. Students interview and counsel clients, investigate facts, negotiate disputes, prepare trial memos and motions, and conduct administrative hearings and court trials. Cases cover a variety of subject areas, including landlord-tenant, unemployment compensation, employment, and consumer matters. The current affordable housing crisis has led to some focus on housing matters, including policy research and recommendations to neighborhood organizations and the City of St. Paul. Students meet weekly in seminar and also meet individually with faculty for supervision. Some required activities (such as court appearances, investigation, and community meetings) take place during normal business hours, but most students are able to combine this clinic's work with their own employment and care-giving responsibilities.

Grading: Letter graded
Credits: variable
Offered: Fall/Spring

Categories: Experiential

Subject Areas: Public Interest Law, Civil Litigation

Students in this clinic will work under the direct supervision of members of the clinic faculty on cases referred from legal services organizations to address the legal needs of indigent clients created by the public health, social, and economic effects of the coronavirus pandemic. Areas of legal need are anticipated to include access to unemployment, social security, and other COVID-related benefits, employee rights, advance planning for eviction defense and other housing remedies, and petitions for medical release from confinement. In addition to learning basic poverty law, students in this clinic will develop skills for using technology to remote representation. A classroom component will meet synchronously but remotely once a week to address common issues of substantive law, procedure, and client representation. Students will have additional remote meetings with the faculty members supervising their cases.

Grading: Letter
Credits: 2 or 3
Offered: Irregularly

Categories: Experiential

Subject Areas: Administrative and Legislative Process, Health Law, Public Interest Law

The Economic Inclusion Clinic is designed to give students experience in both transactional law and with some exposure to litigation as it pertains to preparation and evidence gathering for economic discrimination cases brought by impact litigation co-counsel. The EIC would focus various areas where there are disparities in access to opportunities, including but not limited to the following: · Financial Literacy Segment. This area would focus on the legal aspects of financial literacy. While I have found multiple organizations providing financial literacy covering what banks are looking for, I have yet to find materials that focus on the legal perspective, i.e., what banks are allowed to actually do and what many claim they are required by law to do. Students would provide financial literacy either in the form of one-on-one legal counsel, or community Know Your Rights workshops, in tandem with community-based partners who would organize workshops with grassroots partners that would recruiting the attendees and clients. Students would also draft model legislation. All deliverables would be combined and shared on the EIC’s website. Students would learn Dodd-Frank laws and regs, get client experience teaching legal workshops, and legislative experience drafting statutes and working with lobbyists and legislatures. · Mortgage Discrimination litigation. The DOJ recently announced a campaign to tackle racial discrimination in mortgage lending. The clinic could work in tandem with this campaign to counsel clients and assist in fact gathering. This would give the students experience both in litigation and transactional law. · Social Entrepreneurship counseling and support. This piece would focus on working with potential existing social enterprises in structuring deals, or those needing legal counsel who are interested in undergoing B-labs certification, state benefit corporation incorporation, or forming as another hybrid business org structures with a double bottom line. Essentially, it would provide the students transactional legal experience working for businesses or nonprofits with a double bottom line of being financially sustainable while addressing an important community-based issue.

Grading: Letter
Credits: 3
Offered:

Subject Areas: Public Interest Law, Banking, Business and Commercial, Civil Litigation, Constitutional Law and Civil Rights

Students represent indigent clients in administrative proceedings before U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services, U.S. Consulates, Executive Office for Immigration Review and the Federal Court. Cases concern the immigration status of non-citizens. Students interview and counsel clients, research laws and regulations, write briefs, prepare application filings, prepare for hearings, and act as trial counsel at evidentiary hearings. Heavy emphasis is placed upon active representation of clients and cases that present novel and interesting issues of law and fact. Some required activities, such as court appearances and interviews, take place during normal business hours.

Grading: Letter graded
Credits: variable
Offered: Fall/Spring

Categories: Experiential

Subject Areas: Public Interest Law, Criminal Law

Students provide civil representation to indigent persons incarcerated in Minnesota. Students represent clients from interview through any trial. Cases include domestic relations, imprisonment-related matters (institutional grievances, parole, and detainers), and the full range of other civil problems including debtor-creditor, wills, contracts, torts, and civil rights issues.

Grading: Letter graded
Credits: variable
Offered: Fall/Spring

Categories: Experiential

Subject Areas: Child and Family Law, Public Interest Law, Civil Litigation, Criminal Law

This course explores both fair housing law, and efforts to use law to make housing more available and affordable. Special attention will be paid to the following topics: the history of economic and racial segregation in zoning and housing, redlining, the Fair Housing Act, the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, and other efforts to promote affordable housing. Students will meet and interact with people working in the field.

Grading: Letter
Credits:
Offered:

Subject Areas: Public Interest Law, Real Estate Law

Provides a comprehensive overview of the federal laws as well as policy affecting the ability of foreign nationals to obtain visas to enter and to lawfully remain in the U.S. Topics include the organizational structure of the different branches of government impacting on immigration laws; historical, political, and social aspects of immigration legislation; visa processing and admission requirements; removal grounds and procedures as well as waivers; relief from deportation; applications and petitions; refugees and political asylum; judicial review; and citizenship and loss thereof.

Grading: Exam
Credits: 3
Offered: Spring

Subject Areas: Child and Family Law, Public Interest Law

The goal is to empower law students to engage confidently with legal technology. We seek to embolden students with knowledge of the nature of change in technology and the law so that they can embrace technology to advance justice and society.

Grading: Letter
Credits: 2
Offered:

Subject Areas: Public Interest Law

Covers the nature of mental illness, intellectual disabilities, and other mental disabilities; the provision of treatment and services for mental disabilities: financing, regulation, and administration; involuntary hospitalization and treatment; the right to treatment and services; incompetence and substitute decision-making mechanisms; informed consent; confidentiality, privacy, privilege and the duty to warn; mental disability and the criminal justice system; lawyering and mental disabilities; ethical and practical issues; sexually violent predator civil commitment laws; international human rights norms. This course will be co-taught by a forensic psychiatrist.

Grading: Letter graded
Credits: Variable
Offered: Irregularly

Subject Areas: Health Law, Public Interest Law

The primary objective of this course is to introduce students to the unique legal issues of the poor and how the legal system deals with access to justice and indigency. Students will learn from poverty law practitioners about contemporary legal and social challenges facing low income clients and how those issues are best addressed. We will discuss client representation, policy choices regarding poverty, and effective advocacy strategies. What is the role of the lawyer? We will also introduce a look at the intersection of race, poverty and the law. These themes will be the background for your classroom presentation, and final project.

Grading: Letter graded.
Credits: 2
Offered: Every Other Spring

Subject Areas: Public Interest Law

Examines basic concepts relating to ownership and possession of private property, in part through a comparative perspective. Addresses acquisition of property by find, adverse possession, and gift. Introduces possessory estates and future interests, concurrent ownership and marital interests, and the law of landlord and tenant.

Grading: Letter graded
Credits: 4
Offered: Spring

Categories: Bar Courses, Required

Subject Areas: Public Interest Law, Real Estate Law, Academic Support and Bar Preparation

This course will examine constitutional and statutory regulation of the electoral process. We will explore topics including the right to vote and the right to an equally-weighted vote; representation, districting, and partisan gerrymandering; minority vote dilution, the Voting Rights Act, and racial gerrymandering; election administration, vote-counting, voting technology, and voter identification; and campaign finance laws and reform. The final grade will be based on class participation, an exam, and preparation of a paper on a topic selected by the student and approved by the professor. With the professor's prior approval, students may prepare a "long paper" to satisfy the Advanced Research and Writing requirement. You will get three credits if you write a long paper (which you may do even if you’ve already satisfied the long paper requirement) and two credits if you write a shorter paper. This is a seminar course with limited enrollment.

Grading: Letter graded.
Credits: 2 or 3
Offered: Spring

Categories: Long Paper

Subject Areas: Government Practice, Public Interest Law, Constitutional Law and Civil Rights

This class is about the First Amendment and the Free Press. We will discuss a selection of the legal issues generated by the activities of the mass media. We will consider regulations of print, broadcast, and electronic media, including laws that govern obscenity and pornography, laws aimed at balancing free press and fair trial rights, and laws meant to preserve multiple voices in a market. We will explore publication-related issues such as libel and invasion of privacy, and newsgathering-related issues such as the extent of the reporter's privilege and restrictions on access to information. We will examine common law, regulatory law including Federal Communications Commission regulations, and statutory law including the Freedom of Information Act, but the primary focus of the course will be on how the First Amendment limits governmental control over the media. The final grade will be based on class participation, an exam, and preparation of a paper on a topic selected by the student and approved by the professor. With the professor's prior approval, students may prepare a "long paper" to satisfy the Advanced Research and Writing requirement. You will get three credits if you write a long paper (which you may do even if you’ve already satisfied the long paper requirement) and two credits if you write a shorter paper. This is a seminar course with limited enrollment.

Grading: Letter-graded
Credits: 2 or 3
Offered: Fall

Categories: Long Paper

Subject Areas: Government Practice, Intellectual Property, Public Interest Law, Constitutional Law and Civil Rights

The Institute of Medicine defines public health as "what we, as a society do collectively to assure the conditions for people to be healthy." Unlike health care, which focuses on medical interventions to improve the health of individual patients, public health takes a broader look at the wide-ranging determinants of population health. Although various interventions have been devised to protect health at the population level, disparities in health outcomes persist, with marginalized communities--racial and ethnic minorities, sexual minorities, low socioeconomic status people--bearing a disproportionate amount of negative health outcomes. These inequitable health outcomes are largely products of structural and institutional factors that are grounded in the law. This course will adopt a critical approach to law--along the axes of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual identity, and class--to examine how the law creates, sustains, and legitimizes inequitable health outcomes. This critical approach will be used to analyze the legal dimensions of current public health issues, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the obesity epidemic, tobacco control, healthcare access, natural disasters & climate change, and socio-political determinants of health to challenge students think beyond the traditional paradigms of legal reasoning.

Grading: Letter
Credits: Variable
Offered: Irregularly

Categories: Long Paper

Subject Areas: Health Law, Public Interest Law, Constitutional Law and Civil Rights, Environmental Law

Transitional justice – the emergence of a new justice-focused legal order following conflicts and massive underlying changes in political, social, and economic structures – could hardly be more timely or more important. Throughout the world, societies struggle to acknowledge historical truths, make just reparations and, through processes of reconciliation, find a way forward. This course will take our students into the heart of one such society, using Kosovo as a case study, and will examine and explore in depth the role of law in attempting to build a just society following the transition from Communism and the emergence of Kosovo as an independent republic following the Serbian-Kosovar wars of the previous decades. As a point of comparison, it will examine similar processes in the post-communist Czech Republic, post-apartheid South Africa and post-fascist Chile. It will also examine the same issues in post-Soviet Ukraine and discuss the prospects for the use of law as a means of reconciliation following the current war. We hope to use this course as a template for future courses focusing on transitional justice in other societies that have recently emerged from a conflict or period of repression of human rights. This course will have four main components: • The Theory of Transitional Justice • The Practice of Transitional Justice in Kosovo • Comparative Transitional Justice • The Prospects for Transitional Justice in Ukraine

Grading: Letter
Credits: 2
Offered:

Subject Areas: International and Comparative Law, Public Interest Law

This course will discuss the biological, social, and emotional effects of trauma experienced by individuals and families involved in legal systems. Students will gain skills to incorporate neuroscience and social science research into legal practice to effectively address the trauma experienced by their clients within the boundaries of an attorney-client relationship. There will be discussion of the adequacy of current legal systems’ trauma response and an opportunity to consider methods of change. This course will pay special attention to the ethical responsibility lawyers have to understand and address the trauma of their clients and themselves, including the relationship between competence, zealous advocacy and trauma responsive practices. This course will offer an opportunity to implement lawyering skills through group work and case scenarios.

Grading: Letter
Credits: 3
Offered:

Subject Areas: Child and Family Law, Public Interest Law