Course Details

Description:

This two-semester course provides an introduction to practice in employment law with an emphasis on assisting low-wage workers such as temporary or day laborers and immigrant workers. Clinic participants work in collaboration with a non-profit Workers Center in the Twin Cities that is part of a nationwide movement advocating for and organizing low-wage and immigrant workers. These workers' cases typically involve wage and hour violations and national origin/race discrimination. Students work together with the Workers Center to consider a variety of methods of addressing the workplace problems, including work by non-lawyer advocates, organizing and collective action, and the legal services our clinic provides.

Clinic students are involved in client intake in various community settings, particularly in the Latino, Somali and Hmong immigrant communities. In addition to direct client representation, field work may also include community legal education and working with non-legal advocates, labor unions, and labor organizers. The clinic attempts to have at least one complex case involving discrimination or retaliation on its docket during the year.

The clinic has a three-hour class component in the first semester and a two-hour session in the second semester. Class work involves training in the core lawyering skills of interviewing, counseling, negotiation, discovery, motion practice and legal ethics in practice. Class work also includes substantive reading and discussions on the efficacy of traditional labor and employment law for meeting the workplace needs of marginalized workers and strategies for change. Classes also discuss new client interviews conducted both by our students and lay advocate volunteers and interns at the Workers Center intake sites. Students do case rounds and discuss questions that come up in their case work and organizing.