Clinical Legal Education: Downtown Legal Services - Intensive Program (Paper) (LAW562H1S)

This full-time, one term clinical education program offers students the opportunity to explore legal principles and social policy issues in an empirical, public interest context. The program challenges students to examine issues with respect to the many intersections of law and social inequality in a critical way, while at the same time allowing them to develop the professional and ethical literacy which is essential to the practice of law. Through their clinical work, individualized tutorials and a weekly seminar, students are provided with the chance to test relationships between legal rules and the realities of the justice process, to investigate the complex legal problems and policy issues which affect low income communities, and to develop a conceptual and empirical understanding of public interest lawyering.

The program is conducted at Downtown Legal Services, a community legal clinic operated by the Faculty of Law which provides services to low income people in the areas of immigration and refugee law, family law, university affairs, criminal law and housing law. Students attend weekly multi-disciplinary seminars during the term, and carry a caseload of twelve case units in up to two of these divisions. In addition to the seminars, students participate in individualized tutorials with the clinic’s lawyers and Executive Director. The casework includes client counseling; case theory formulation; legal research; drafting of pleadings, written submissions, facta and professional correspondence; development of litigation strategy; pre-trial procedures; settlement negotiations; and trial advocacy in hearings or trials. Students are also required to attend one of the clinic’s satellite clinics and to participate in the clinic’s test cases and public legal education workshops.