Transnational ClinicFounded: Penn Law's new Transnational Legal Clinic launched in Fall 2006, headed by Sarah Paoletti. 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. 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 will meet in seminar twice weekly to obtain training in fundamental lawyering skills (e.g., interviewing, counseling, case theory, fact investigation and persuasive advocacy). The seminar will be taught as an interactive class, and the students will work throughout the semester with a simulated client: they will participate in video-taped interviews and counseling sessions with their "client," and will also use the information they have developed in the course of the interviews to develop a case theory and a strategic case plan, including fact investigation and identification of different advocacy methods and venues. In addition, seminar time will be used for case rounds, during which students will be called upon to share with their clinic colleagues various developments in their cases, and to solicit suggestions and feedback regarding specific legal, factual, ethical and strategic issues that arise during the course of the semester. In addition to the weekly seminar, students will meet as a team regularly with the faculty supervisor to receive supervision and constructive feedback. The seminar is not intended to serve as a substitute for an international law or immigration course. Substantive law will only be discussed to the extent that it is relevant to the specific cases in which students are involved. The students will be responsible – with the guidance of their faculty supervisor – for researching and learning the underlying substantive law relevant to their individual cases. Students will develop competence in fundamental lawyering skills as well as critical self-reflection allowing them to continue to analyze and learn from what lawyers do through observation and, more importantly, through their own experiences. Transnational Clinic
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