Michelle Alexander ’92 will be launching a new clinic at Stanford.

In the past, few law school students received real-world training on big civil rights cases. But starting in January, Stanford Law School students will have the opportunity to do just that. The Law School has appointed Michelle Alexander ’92, previously the director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California’s Racial Justice Project, as an associate professor of law (teaching). She will be developing and teaching a course on civil rights litigation and advocacy, which includes the new Civil Rights Clinic. Vice Dean Barton H. Thompson,Jr., describes her as one of the nation’s “leading civil rights attorneys” and a “phenomenal” teacher.

Alexander says that she wants students to learn “how litigation can be used effectively as a tool to achieve social change when it is combined with other tactics, such as media advocacy, lobbying, coalition-building, and grassroots organizing.” The Civil Rights Clinic will be the Law School’s sixth clinic. The others are the: Community Law Clinic, which relaunches this fall; the Criminal Prosecution Clinic; the Environmental Law Clinic; the Law and Technology Clinic; and the Youth and Education Law Clinic.