Practice Areas

The CLC practices in four areas:

  • Housing (eviction defense and Section 8 termination),
  • Social Security Disability,
  • Wage and Hour and related workers’ rights, and
  • Criminal Record Expungement.

The practice areas are selected because they lie at the intersection where the community’s unmet legal needs and students’ learning needs correspond; the cases enable students to engage in a wide-range of conventional lawyering activities, with an emphasis on trial-level skills (interviewing, fact investigation, legal research, counseling, negotiation, trial and administrative advocacy), while also working on the very pressing problems of Stanford’s low-income neighbors.

A typical student’s caseload might include preparing to file a wage and hour complaint on behalf of an immigrant day worker whose boss didn’t pay him time-and-a-half for his overtime hours, researching the law governing the termination of a Section 8 tenancy, and preparing for a hearing to convince a judge to exercise his or her discretion to dismiss certain convictions from a client’s criminal record. The modes of preparation for these cases include intensive one-on-one supervision, “case rounds” where students discuss their work in a group setting, and “moots”—simulations of upcoming representation events, from negotiations to evidentiary hearings.