Community Law Clinic
For more than 40 years, the Community Law Clinic (CLC) has been Stanford’s neighborhood legal services clinical offering. CLC has been providing free civil legal services to Stanford’s low-income neighbors since its founding in East Palo Alto in the 1980s. CLC now carries that legacy forward in an office just located a few miles off-campus in Redwood City, proximate to the mid-peninsula communities where clients live and work. The off-campus location is the signature feature of CLC, which reflects the importance of both accessibility to clients and of students’ appreciating the diversity of the lives lived in Silicon Valley.
CLC is a demanding trial clinic, and asks a lot of its students who must juggle multiple matters simultaneously in three distinct subject matters. Under the supervision of the clinic instructors, students represent clients in housing, social security disability, and post-conviction relief matters. Consistent with court rules, CLC students are given first chair responsibility for their clients’ cases, learning not only core litigation skills but also exercising judgment and undertaking leadership on significant projects. Under close supervision and with extensive opportunities to prepare, reflect and revise, students meet with their clients, interview witnesses, review documents, negotiate with opposing counsel, draft pleadings and other legal documents, and represent their clients in court. Transitioning from being a law student to being a lawyer, CLC students learn that legal analysis is but one part of successful representation. They learn how to set that legal analysis in motion, in real life contexts characterized by indeterminate facts, anxious clients, intransigent opponents, and busy trial judges. They also learn that legal problems arise in contexts, and to appreciate what lawyers do and do not control when it comes to outcomes.
Students are supervised in their cases by Clinic Director and Professor Juliet Brodie, Associate Director Lisa Douglass, and Clinical Supervising Attorney Danielle Jones. Bilingual administrative staff facilitate communications with monolingual Spanish-Speaking clients.
CLC offers more than just hands-on experience; it’s an opportunity to take on real responsibility. After years of focusing on doctrine, CLC brought my legal education to life, showing me what it truly means to be an advocate.
Henry Bradley, '25
Inside Stanford Lawyer
In the News
New ‘forever home’ for Stanford Law community clinic
RWC Pulse
“We are incredibly blessed to do this work on the dime of Stanford University,” clinic director Professor Juliet Brodie addressed the attendees of the clinic’s grand opening, “which liberates us to really lawyer the heck out of every single case and to teach our students to teach our clients what…
Read More : New ‘forever home’ for Stanford Law community clinicStanford Law’s Community Law Clinic Celebrates Opening of New Redwood City Home
Stanford Law study sheds light on rising evictions in San Mateo County
Stanford announces the 2024 Bass Fellows in Undergraduate Education
Stanford Law Answers Attorney General’s Call to Address the Covid-19 Housing and Eviction Crisis
CLC Alum Laura Bixby (JD '14) wins 2026 Miles L. Rubin Public Interest Award
I keep doing [direct services] work because it is an antidote to despair. I lose—and more importantly, my clients lose—a lot of the time. But you can measure victory in a lot of different ways. Often, victory means that a client gets to see someone fighting for them, gets to have their story told, and their day in court. Even if they lose, that is nonetheless meaningful. My clients have often never had someone stand up for them like that before.
As I look around the world, there are many large, terrible problems that I cannot solve. Compared to what is going on in our country and the world, my clients’ problems may seem small, and fixing them or making them slightly less bad may seem almost insignificant. But the wonderful thing about doing direct services is that it allows me to see the real, tangible impact I can have on my client’s lives.
Publications
CLC Featured on MLC Blog
Student Argues in Court for Long-Awaited Disability Benefits for Clinic Client
On February 12, the Community Law Clinic helped a 23-year-old visually impaired and disabled client gain approval for Social Security disability benefits, after he and his mother had been trying to get the benefits for over a decade. Rebecca Vogel (JD '15), supervised by Clinical Supervising Attorney Lisa Douglass, represented the client…
Read More : Student Argues in Court for Long-Awaited Disability Benefits for Clinic Client