Service Matters: How Yale Law School Clinics Change the World

From modest beginnings, the clinical program at the Law School has grown into one of the School’s crown jewels. Unlike most law schools, Yale Law School students can join a clinic during the spring of their first year and stay for up to five semesters, allowing clinic students to take on cases with a longer time horizon and stick with them. Today, some 90% of students participate in one of the School’s more than 30 clinics; for some, the opportunity to do so is why they come to Yale. 

“The breadth of clinical opportunities and experiences was certainly amongst the most, if not the most, significant factor in my decision about where to go to law school,” said Aaron Scherzer ’10. He now directs the Policing Project at the New York University School of Law, a position he was drawn to in part because it reminded him of his “fantastic experiences with the clinics.” 

“Public service is built into the bones of the place,” Dean Heather K. Gerken reflected. “It is astonishing to see the extraordinarily robust commitment to this work, both by clinical faculty but also by nonclinical faculty. We expect that you will serve your community in one fashion or another.” 

That commitment to clinical education and public service has deep roots. “As early as the late 1920s, Yale students were committed to legal aid services in New Haven as a means of serving the surrounding community and gaining practical skills,” Laura (Holland) Hoey ’01 wrote in “Invading the Ivory Tower,” a history of clinical education at Yale. 

In fact, pressure from students spurred the creation of the New Haven Municipal Legal Aid Bureau in 1927; students did much of the agency’s investigative work in the following years. Among the faculty, however, their efforts were seen as social, not scholarly, and no academic credit was awarded to the hardworking volunteers. 

None of this sat right with Jerome Frank, a research scholar at the Law School and leading lawyer and intellectual. In 1933, Frank published what would become a landmark publication, “Why Not a Clinical Lawyer-School?” In it, he decried the staid approach that had overtaken American law schools and called for change. Students needed to be trained by people who had actually practiced law, he argued, and to witness real legal proceedings in action. He also proposed clinics housed within law schools, modeled on those used in medical schools. 

Frank saw clinics as playing an essential pedagogical role for aspiring lawyers. After all, he wrote later, no one learns to play golf by “sitting in a locker room analyzing newspaper accounts of important golf matches that had been played, by someone else, some years previous.” 

Although his vision did not come to full fruition in his lifetime, Frank did succeed in bringing about important changes, including the Law School’s official recognition of the student Legal Aid Association. After Frank’s death in 1957, it was renamed the Jerome N. Frank Legal Aid Association, and later, the Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization. 

Frank’s belief in giving students the opportunity to put their newfound knowledge into practice did not die with him. Other reformers took up the cause — among them, Francis X. Dineen ’61. As director of New Haven’s Legal Aid Bureau, Dineen became “essentially the first clinical professor for Yale Law students,” Hoey writes, and mentored generations of students. (In 1990, he was officially appointed as a visiting clinical lecturer.) 

Also on the case was William Pincus, a program associate at the Ford Foundation who became president of the Ford-funded Council on Legal Education for Professional Responsibility (CLEPR). CLEPR made grants to law schools aimed at seeding clinical programs. In 1969, after much internal debate, Yale applied for and received one of them. 

The funding enabled YLS to hire three figures who would go on to shape clinical education at Yale and beyond: Clinical Professor Emeritus Dennis E. Curtis ’66, William O. Douglas Clinical Professor Emeritus Stephen Wizner, and the late Daniel Freed ’51. 

In October 2023, Gerken presented Curtis, Dineen, Freed, and Wizner, jointly, with the Award of Merit, the Yale Law School Association’s highest honor, and took the opportunity to reflect on their collective legacy. “These four remarkable men helped shape Yale Law School in the most profound way possible,” she said. “They have generated waves of change that have washed across communities around the world. They have taught generations of students why service matters.” 

But winning awards for creating a pathbreaking clinical program was the furthest thing from Wizner’s mind when Freed first called him about the possibility of a job. In fact, he told the audience at Alumni Weekend, one of the first things he said to Freed was, “What’s a clinical program?” In a way, he has spent five decades answering that question.

Among their many contributions, the trio of Freed, Curtis, and Wizner were instrumental in the passage of Connecticut’s Student Practice Rule, which was (and remains) unusual in allowing even first-year students to represent clients and participate in clinics. The proposal attracted some skepticism at first but has turned out to be one of the most important and distinctive aspects of Yale’s clinical program.  

Any doubts about the competence of young law students were quickly dispatched. Judges told clinical faculty that the students were often more and better prepared than practicing lawyers. After all, Wizner said, “if your student has one case and one client and is very nervous about going to court, they prepare.” 

At a practical level, the involvement of 1Ls also significantly increased the capacity of the clinics. Because 2Ls and 3Ls already have some experience under their belt, they can mentor their younger peers, providing training and mentoring that, elsewhere, would have to be done by faculty members. Thanks to this peer-to-peer mentoring, clinical faculty members can oversee a much larger caseload.  

Ultimately, said Michael J. Wishnie ’93, William O. Douglas Clinical Professor of Law (and himself a former clinic student), the involvement of first-year students “set in motion a clinical world where 1Ls could come in and 2Ls and 3Ls could take seriously their ideals” — and tackle more ambitious issues and cases. 

The scope and aspirations of the clinical program began expanding almost right away, Wizner said. Initially, students focused on smaller, more local issues, such as eviction cases and other landlord–tenant disputes — areas where the Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization continues to play an active role. Gradually, however, faculty and students began identifying other areas where they felt they could learn and contribute. 

Today, clinics range widely, and students often participate in several during their time in law school. The diversity of subject matter has also given rise to a diversity of approaches. Sometimes, students and faculty are working with individual clients on short-term issues; clinics have also become involved in complex, multiyear cases. 

Among those long and challenging cases is a 1992 action involving Haitian refugees detained at Guantánamo Bay; their cause was taken up by the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic. More than 100 students — Wishnie among them — would work on the case, which took nearly two years and eventually went before the Supreme Court. The saga later became the subject of a book, Storming the Court: How a Band of Law Students Fought the President — and Won by Brandt Goldstein ’92. 

Yale’s clinics have also proved responsive to urgent matters, recently securing — in the span of just 13 months — nationwide injunctions in three high-profile cases with significant political and legal ramifications. In 2017, the Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic (WIRAC) mobilized overnight to stop the so-called Muslim Ban; the following year, WIRAC was in the news again when it put a stop to the termination of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. 

Clinic students, according to Goldman Clinical Professor of Law Muneer Ahmad, who directs WIRAC, approach their work with determination to change the world for the better. “That’s the kind of energy and kind of intellectual insight that makes all the rest of the work possible,” Ahmad said.

Also in 2017, students with the San Francisco Affirmative Litigation Project filed the first case in the nation challenging an executive order that would have denied most federal grants to sanctuary jurisdictions. They prevailed, receiving a temporary and then permanent injunction. 

“How many organizations in the country can you think of that have been directly involved in winning three nationwide injunctions in a little over a year?”, Gerken said of the trio of victories. “Talk about punching above your weight.”

In a historic 2018 ruling, the Veterans Legal Services Clinic won a case that allowed veterans to bring class action lawsuits against the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs for the first time. Since then, the clinic has brought separate class actions against the Army, the Navy and Marine Corps, and the Air Force on behalf of veterans denied their benefits. (The clinic’s work was also featured on a 2014 episode of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart — not a courtroom victory, but a sign of influence nevertheless.) 

Cases involving single clients have been no less impactful. The Challenging Mass Incarceration Clinic, for instance, obtained a significant sentence modification for Clyde Meikle, a client who spent more than 25 years in prison. Thanks to that change, Meikle was released in 2021 and now works with the Vera Institute of Justice as an advocate for incarcerated people. 

Alongside these legal actions, Yale’s clinics have also produced landmark reports. In 2014, for instance, the Lowenstein Clinic documented the evidence of genocide against the Rohingya people of Myanmar. In partnership with the ACLU, the clinic also produced a major investigation of the use of solitary confinement at Connecticut’s Northern Correctional Institution; the prison closed in 2021. And the Rule of Law Clinic’s report on the 25th Amendment attracted praise from prominent lawyers, journalists, and politicians. 

But even when clinical cases don’t make headlines, they can have a profound impact on students and clients. The late J. L. Pottenger Jr. ’75, who for decades led the Housing Clinic, was widely known for teaching students to treat every case with care — regardless of its ability to attract attention. As his colleague Anika Singh Lemar, Clinical Professor of Law, put it, “he modeled steadfast dedication to his clients and careful attention to every filing, whether in Housing Court or the U.S. Supreme Court.” 

Similarly, Peters’ clinical career involved representing many asylum-seekers and children in the foster care system — cases that are, by their nature, highly personal and often confidential, and require students to forge relationships of trust with their clients.

Building trust was especially important for students in the Sol and Lillian Goldman Family Advocacy for Children and Youth Clinic, which Peters led from 1992 to 2017. For students, “loving children and wanting to help them ended up looking and feeling very different from what they’d thought,” Peters said. Often, given the underfunded and byzantine nature of the foster care system, cases didn’t turn out as students or their young clients hoped. Instead, students learned to focus on clear, honest communication, even when the truth was difficult. “Our number one mantra was ‘Make no promises you can’t keep,’” Peters said. “In some cases, that meant making very few promises.”

Today, the influence of Yale’s clinical program is felt far beyond New Haven, thanks to the generations of alumni who have gone on to teach in or create clinics elsewhere. For Wizner, the American Association of Law Schools Conference on Clinical Legal Education has become a family reunion of sorts. “We always would see 30, 40, 50 graduates of ours who are now clinical teachers,” he said. 

The experiment that started in the 1960s is now a standard part of legal education. “It’s really very satisfying,” Wizner said.  

The growth and increasing centralization of clinical education has brought with it welcome changes. “When I started at the Law School, there were very few women on the faculty, much less clinical women,” Peters said; by the time she retired, the racial and gender diversity of the clinical faculty had increased significantly. There are other aspects of the clinical program she hopes will never change. Though delighted by the range of opportunities now available, “I still believe in the magic of individual client representation,” Peters said. “Developing a trusting collaboration with a client — that is just like nothing else. So while I think it’s amazing that we’re doing all this other work, I would want there always to be a place for those cases.” 

“I hope we’ve continued to retain the freewheeling, up-for-anything quality of LSO,” said Wishnie — and the sense of community that he and so many other students found. After all, the clinics offer students a chance to pursue causes they are passionate about and develop new skills, but they are also “the place where your friends are hanging out.” 

That was certainly Scherzer’s experience. Most of his time outside of class was spent in the clinic basement. “I remember many late nights there discussing legal issues or helping each other on filings or doing things like gathering exhibits, and just everyone pitching in together to help out,” he said. “Basically, the clinics are where I found my real home in law school.”