Clinical Offerings
The upper division curriculum includes a variety of opportunities for clinical legal education. "Clinical" courses are of two kinds. First, clinical refers to courses in which the learning of legal principles occurs through actual work on cases in particular subject matter areas. For example, the law of prisoners' rights and post-conviction remedies is taught in the Post-Conviction Justice Project, a course in which students represent inmates in the Federal Correctional Institution in Los Angeles in state and federal court matters. This representation is under the direct supervision of full-time Law School faculty members. About 40 students participate each semester, traveling to the prison to meet with their clients one evening each week, attending seminars at USC Law, preparing briefs and papers, negotiating and dealing with prosecutors, prison and court personnel, and making court appearances on behalf of clients. Students have appeared and argued in state courts, federal trial courts, and the U.S. Court of Appeals.
Another example of live client clinical teaching is the year long Children's Legal Issues in which students learn the relevant substantive law and then work on cases concerning dependent and neglected children, children with AIDS, family arrangements and school administrative hearings.
The second type of clinical course concentrates on specific lawyering skills taught in a classroom setting through the use of hypothetical case materials, with actors and actresses playing the roles of clients. The best illustration of this form of clinical teaching is the three-course sequence of Pretrial, Trial and Appellate Advocacy, which covers the stages in the litigation process suggested by the course titles. In these courses, students actually perform, in a simulated courtroom or law office environment, the multiple tasks required of lawyers. Most work is done in small groups; students are videotaped and intensively reviewed by the instructors. A student can take part or all of this sequence. The three courses together require the student to do at least the following: client interviewing and counseling, legal research, fact-finding, drafting of legal documents, negotiation with opposing counsel, arguing pretrial motions to a judge, preparing witnesses to testify, selecting a jury, conducting direct and cross-examination, proposing and opposing exhibits and testimonial evidence, arguing to a jury, drafting and arguing an appellate brief.
The Post-Conviction Project and the advocacy courses are not the only clinical courses in the curriculum, but they are useful examples of the variety of clinical teaching. A course in a specific area of law, like Post-Conviction, necessarily requires students to acquire basic courtroom, negotiation and client interviewing skills. And the skills-oriented advocacy courses require students to be familiar with substantive areas like evidence, procedure and the law in the area of the hypothetical client's problems. These two kinds of clinical courses supplement each other, just as substantive knowledge and expert skills do in the practice of law. Considered as a whole, USC's clinical courses provide the foundation of knowledge and skill necessary to begin the practice of law.
USC Law has five Clinics:
