Transnational Legal Clinic

Founded: 2006

The Transnational Legal Clinic provides students with an opportunity to explore the role of the lawyer in settings that cut across cultures, borders, languages and legal systems. Students enrolled in the clinic engage in direct legal representation of individual and organizational clients before a variety of international and domestic venues in cases and projects that raise international and comparative legal norms.

Members of the Transnational Legal Clinic assisted in gathering information
from Liberian refugees in Ghana for The Liberian Truth and Reconciliation
Commission. Students and Professor Sarah Paoletti, who heads the Law
School's Transnational Clinic, traveled to Ghana to interview refugees and take
statements about their experiences in war-torn Liberia, and as refugees in Ghana.

Specifically, students represent clients in asylum and other immigration cases with human rights implications. Students also have the opportunity to engage in broader advocacy efforts raising settled and developing international human rights principles. The fieldwork is designed to expose the students to a full range of advocacy tools, such as litigation, legislative and other policy initiatives, investigation and report writing, community organizing and potentially transactional work as well. Students work in teams of two or more under faculty supervision and engage in all aspects of client representation (such as client interviews, case theory development, fact investigation, strategic planning, client counseling, negotiating, and written and oral advocacy). Students are expected to engage in critical reflection on the choices presented and choices made in the course of lawyering, as well as their individual development as a lawyer.

Throughout the semester, students will have the opportunity to discuss competing interests underlying the development of the immigration laws in the United States and their relationship to international law and treaty obligations, as well as the role of international and comparative law in legal advocacy, law and organizing, and questions surrounding who is the client in the larger human rights cases.

The Clinic meets in seminar twice weekly to obtain training in fundamental lawyering skills (e.g., interviewing, counseling, case theory, fact investigation and persuasive advocacy).

Students have the opportunity to:

• Participate in video-taped interviews and counseling sessions with their simulated and actual clients, and receive helpful critique from their faculty supervisor after each session.
• Develop a case theory and a strategic case plan, including fact investigation and identification of different advocacy methods and venues using the information developed in the course of the interviews,
• Present various developments in their cases to their colleagues during weekly seminars dedicated to case rounds.  Students can solicit suggestions and feedback regarding specific legal, factual, ethical and strategic issues that arise during the course of their client representation.
• Meet with their faculty supervisor once per week to receive case work supervision and constructive feedback

Two students working on immigrant rights testify at a hearing at the
Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Washington, D.C,
on due process violations in the enforcement of immigrant detention
and deportation policies in the United States.

Sarah Paoletti, Practice Associate Professor of Law

Transnational Legal Clinic

University of Pennsylvania Law School
Gittis Center for Clinical Legal Studies
3400 Chestnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104
Tel: 215.898.8427
Fax: 215.573.6783