For more than two decades, the Community Law Clinic (CLC) has been Stanford Law School’s only off-campus clinic, functioning as a busy community law office embedded near the neighborhoods it serves. Its mission has remained steadfast since 2003: to provide critical legal services to low-income community members while giving future lawyers hands-on experience that can’t be taught in a classroom.

That purpose has carried the CLC through a succession of much-loved but less-than-ideal spaces, from a deteriorating building in East Palo Alto to a hard-to-find office near a Highway 101 interchange and, most recently, temporary quarters on Stanford’s Redwood City campus. Its new location is a light-filled office in downtown Redwood City—steps from the courthouse and the neighborhoods where many of its clients live. “We feel like we’ve finally landed,” says Juliet Brodie, CLC director and Peter E. Haas Faculty Director of Stanford’s Haas Center for Public Service. “We’re in the heart of the county seat, easy to find, near public transportation. We’ve ended up in just the right place.”

But a better location doesn’t change the scope of the work.

“Our clients are still facing eviction, fighting for disability benefits, and trying to rebuild their lives after incarceration,” Brodie says, touching on the clinic’s three long-standing practice areas. “The new space makes it easier for our clients to find us and for students to experience what it’s like to work in a neighborhood law office, but the challenges our clients face remain the same.”

Those urgent, everyday legal problems are what make the clinic such a powerful training ground for students like Fausto Rojas, JD ’26, who says the CLC has offered the ideal pathway to his planned career as a public defender. He has learned to see legal issues in the context of clients’ lived realities: housing instability, poverty, disability.

“I wanted to work directly with clients and see more of the life circumstances that shape people’s experiences with the legal system, not just the criminal side,” Rojas says. “One of the best parts of the clinic is getting to build a case from the ground up with your team, digging into the facts, crafting a narrative, and then seeing it make a real difference for someone’s life. When our clients won their disability benefits, the relief on their face said everything. It’s the kind of experience that stays with you.”

Space to focus and connect

As with all clinics at Stanford Law, CLC’s participating students—approximately 25 annually—spend a full quarter in the clinic, stepping out of the classroom and into the full-time work of lawyering. They operate under the supervision of clinic faculty members whose exceptionally long tenures speak to their dedication to the clinic’s clients—and the demand for their services. Brodie has been with the clinic since 2006, clinical supervising attorney Danielle Jones since 2004, and clinical supervising attorney Lisa Douglass (BA/MA ’94) since 2007.

The CLC’s roots stretch back even further, to the mid-1980s, when a group of Stanford Law students launched the East Palo Alto Community Law Project (EPACLP), a neighborhood-based legal services model that endured into the early 2000s. EPACLP’s off-campus location in a low-income neighborhood was central to its mission, later embraced by the CLC, which took on the mantle of EPACLP when it closed.

“The off-campus model is foundational to what we do,” says Jones, who leads the post-conviction relief practice in which students help clients clear criminal records and navigate the challenges of reentering their communities after incarceration. “Students talk about it all the time. It’s one of the most meaningful aspects of their experience here.”

Clinic student Rojas agrees. “Having that physical distance from campus gives you space to focus and to connect more deeply with both your fellow students and the community,” he says. “It also makes it easier to meet clients where they are and see the realities of their lives.”

Douglass directs the Social Security disability practice, where students get a taste of administrative hearings and fight to secure monthly income and benefits for clients living with mental and physical disabilities. “It’s like a mini-trial,” Douglass says. “Students put extraordinary time and energy into these cases, and it pays off.”

Under Brodie’s supervision in the eviction defense area, students handle fast-moving cases in which the entire arc of civil litigation might be compressed into just a few weeks. They interview clients, draft pleadings, negotiate with landlords’ counsel, argue motions, and appear in court—now, happily, only a short walk away.

Learning the law by practicing it

“This isn’t just a clinic for people who plan to work in legal aid,” Brodie says. “It’s outstanding litigation, leadership, and client-centered training for anyone. We have alumni in big law who still talk about how this shaped their careers and informs their pro bono work today.”

Amy Heath, JD ’16, is one example. “When I joined my firm, they asked what type of pro bono work I wanted to do and I said Social Security disability appeals, which I had loved during CLC and continued to have exposure to as a law clerk after graduating,” says Heath, a special counsel at Covington. “I don’t think the firm had a lot of experience with that area of law, but they found a way to make it work.”

Nisha Kashyap, JD ’14, a program director with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, says the CLC is where she learned to advocate “with courage and empathy.” The clinic was also “a place of many firsts,” she says. “My first meet and confer with opposing counsel, my first trial. Getting that hands-on experience in such a supportive and safe environment was invaluable, and now that I supervise students and newer lawyers, I draw upon the excellent supervision modeled by the CLC professors and staff.”

“Lawyers are usually brought in when things are bad,” notes Douglass. “Our students learn how to be with a client through that, how to make the client feel supported and heard, and to make sure nothing gets left on the table.”

“Many students come to law school with a narrow idea of what lawyers do,” Brodie adds. “Here, they learn to navigate real facts, real clients, real judges, and opposing counsel who have power over their clients’ lives. They discover they can do it. That’s transformational.” SL