About the Law Offices
The Law Offices of Chicago-Kent offers ten long-standing programs
in live-client clinical legal education which accommodate over
150 students in the fall and spring semesters and over 50 students
in the summer semester. The live-client programs include eight
In-house and two Externship Programs. The eight In-House
programs consist of the Employment Discrimination/Civil Rights
Litigation with some General Practice Program, the Criminal Defense
Litigation Program, the Health Law Litigation Program, the Mediation
and Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) Program, the Low Income
Taxpayer's Clinic, the Intellectual Property/Patent Program, the
Immigration Law Program, and the Family Law Program. The
two Externship programs include: the Judicial Externship Program
and the Legal Externship Program.
The Law Offices also offers two additional experiential learning courses
taught via the simulation method: Business Entity Formation and Business
Entity Transactions. Each simulation course is taught once each year
and enrollment is limited to 15 students in each course.
All Law Offices clinical programs with the exception of the Legal
Externship are open to second and third-year students. The
Legal Externship Program is open to senior law students only.
All clinical education courses are electives. Students may
take a maximum of sixteen clinical credit hours toward graduation.
All clinical courses are graded on a pass/low pass/fail basis
and in all live-client clinical programs the students work on
actual cases under the supervision of an attorney or judge.
Through their work, students are exposed to a broad spectrum of
legal skills.
Additional externship programs in two certificate specialties
are also offered by the law school. The Labor/Employment
Law Externship Program is offered through the Labor/Employment
Law Certificate Program and the Environmental and Energy Law Externship
Program is offered through the Environmental Law Certificate Program.
Further, in 1998 the law school introduced two new and experimental
externship programs: The Rule of Law Externship Program and the Tax,
Corporate Tax, and Business Law Externship Program.
The in-house Clinical faculty, along
with the students under their supervision, have worked on a number
of significant cases including representing a plaintiff class in
a class action in the federal district court on behalf of women
on Medicaid and nurse-midwives challenging the State of Illinois'
refusal to pay for home births for Medicaid recipients; acting as
an arbitrator in an automobile manufacturing case in which a major
U.S. car manufacturer and a consumer were disputing over alleged
defects in automobile design, materials, and workmanship; representing
plaintiffs in actions under the Civil Rights Act for alleged police
brutality; representing plaintiffs in several sexual harassment
cases; representing a defendant in the federal habeas corpus phase
of a death penalty case; representing a defendant in the first case
in Cook County filed under the Sexually Violent Persons Commitment
Act in which the defendant alleges that the Act violates the double
jeopardy and ex post facto provisions of the United States
Constitution and the due process clause of the Illinois Constitution;
representing plaintiffs in several federal district court cases
in which they allege that they were improperly fired because of
their disabilities--in violation of the Americans With Disabilities
Act; and representing a young woman soon-to-be divorced from her
much older more educated husband to have her declared an "innocent
spouse" and therefore not liable for their joint income tax liability.
Clinical Faculty
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