Legal Scholarship for Equal Justice (LSEJ) – 6904

Please note: This is a LIMITED DROP class.

Legal Scholarship for Equal Justice is a project of the Minnesota Justice Foundation offered jointly by all of Minnesota’s law schools. The class meets at a different law school each year and is open to students from all the law schools. This course is not an internship, but rather a three-credit research course.

This course addresses legal issues affecting poverty lawyers and their clients. The course is ideal for students who want to

• use their legal and non-legal skills to promote equal justice for all
• get real-world experience working with public-interest lawyers
• hone their legal, interpersonal, writing, and presentation skills
• create a significant piece of legal scholarship and present it at a CLE seminar.

Classroom sessions focus on the development of project topics; research skills needed for equal justice issues, policy analysis, and problem-solving; working collaboratively; the role of the public-interest lawyer; and additional topics of interest to the seminar participants.

Students are linked with the attorneys whose legal issues generated their projects and who serve as field supervisors.  Students should expect to spend significant time working in the field and gathering information for their papers. Through this field work, students will gain an understanding of public-interest practice in general, the legal issues involved in their individual projects, and the real-world implications of their topics.

Students choose a research topic from the LSEJ research topic list or a topic of their own that advances equal justice. The field work and the written work need not cover precisely the same area, but they should be related.  Topics may include both civil and criminal law issues that affect low-income people or the cause of equal justice. Past topics include Hmong Marriage Legislation, Criminalization of the Mentally Ill, The Connection between Traffic Fines and Poverty, Housing Problems for Evicted Tenants, Mixed Use of Brownfield Reclamation, Using Law and Medicine to Reduce Asthma, Tenant Blacklisting, and Racism in the Child Protection System. Examples of completed works are on the LSEJ Completed Works Website.  The best topics are not broad overviews of general subjects, but focused, policy-oriented examinations of specific issues that are amenable to concrete suggestions for improvement and progress.

Each student in this course will do the following:

1. Promptly identify a field instructor to supervise the student’s field work.  Assistance in finding a field instructor is available from the Minnesota Justice Foundation.
2. Before January 20, identify the general area (but not the specific topic) that will be the subject of the written work to be completed and presented at the CLE session at the end of the course.  Choose the specific topic by the end of the second class, after consulting with the professor. 
3. Prepare for and participate in the two-hour weekly classroom sessions.
4. Spend 25 hours during the course of the seminar doing field work, supervised and guided by the field supervisor, and report on their work.
5. Prepare written work that satisfies the Upper Division Writing Requirement, as described in the Law School’s Academic Rule 5.4 (Single Project Category).  Collaborative Writing Exercises are encouraged but not required. See https://www.law.umn.edu/sites/law.umn.edu/files/policy-on-approving-courses-under-the-legal-writing-requirement.pdf  (Although students from other law schools may not be subject to the same requirement, the expectations for all students will be similar.)  The written work will be posted on the LSEJ website.
6. Present the written work at a CLE course scheduled for the last day of class, not by reading it, but by giving an effective oral presentation.

Enrollment is limited to 16.  Because of the strict cap on the number of students and the logistical challenges inherent in this type of course, students who have registered for the course may not drop it after January 26, 2016.  Students who are interested but unsure about whether to register are urged to contact the instructor before January 26.  The first class session will be Wednesday, January 20; the last class session and the Continuing Legal Education program will be Wednesday, April 20.