Students participating in clinical programs are encouraged to take opportunities to integrate their clinical work into an upper year paper course. Students must obtain approval from the Clinical Director, the paper course instructor, and Assistant Dean, Students.
This part-time, one semester, 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.
Students in the University Affairs Clinic will have the opportunity to take on two very different types of files in the university context: academic offences and academic appeals. The casework in this division includes client counselling; case theory formulation; legal research; drafting of pleadings, written submissions, facta and professional correspondence; development of litigation strategy; pre-trial procedures; settlement negotiations; and oral advocacy.
For the academic offences files, students represent clients charged with offences such as plagiarism, unauthorized aid, and personation. In the academic appeals files, students represent clients who are seeking to overturn university decisions. These decisions often include grades or procedural matters such as requests to defer exams or late withdrawal from courses for medical or compassionate reasons. Student caseworkers in this clinic will have the opportunity to appear at dean’s meetings, conduct negotiations and hearings.
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 a number of areas of law. Students attend weekly multi-disciplinary seminars during the term, and carry a caseload of five case units in one of these divisions. In addition to the seminars, students participate in individualized tutorials with the clinic’s lawyers and Executive Director. Students are also encouraged to attend one of the clinic’s satellite clinics and to participate in the clinic’s test cases and public legal education workshops.
No previous experience, pre-requisites or co-requisites are necessary. However, students generally find that taking relevant classroom courses in conjunction with this program provides advantages in both their clinical work and the classroom courses. For students in the University Affairs Clinic, it is helpful to have an understanding of basic administrative law principles.
