CIVIL RIGHTS LAW

PENN LAW FACULTY

PRO BONO PLACEMENTS

Advancement Project
American Civil Liberties Union – National Headquarters; NJ; PA
American United for the Separation of Church and State
Anti-Defamation League
Arnold & Porter
Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund
Ballard Spahr Andrew & Ingersoll, LLP
Blank Rome Comisky & McCauley, LLP
Brennan Center for Justice
Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR)
Center for Disability Law & Policy
Center for Individual Rights
Center for Lesbian and Gay Civil Rights
City of Philadelphia Law Department – Civil Rights Unit
Committee of Seventy
Drinker Biddle & Reath, LLP
Fair Share Housing Center
Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, Inc. (FIRE)
General Counsel of the School District of Philadelphia
Greenfield Intercultural Center
Institute for Justice
International Legal Defense Counsel – International Recoveries
Juvenile Law Center
Kairys, Rudovsky, Messing, & Feinberg, LLP
Kensington Welfare Rights Union (KWRU)
Kline & Specter
Kohn Swift & Graf, PC
Krasner & Restrepo
Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights
Lutheran Children and Family Service – Adult Education Program
Mann & Mitchell
National Center for Environmental Health Strategies
National Employment Law Project, Inc.
National Federation for the Blind of Pennsylvania
National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, Inc.
National Workrights Institute
Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project (NEDAP)
New Jersey State Bar Association
New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, Inc.
Penn Housing Rights Project
Penn Law Spring Break Abroad
Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations
Philadelphia Police Advisory Commission
Public Defender Service – Washington, D.C. – Mental Health Division
Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia (PILCOP)
Puerto Rican Legal Defense & Education Fund (PRLDEF)
Racial Profiling Project
Reproductive Rights Project
Servicemembers Legal Defense Network (SLDN)
Social Security Administration
Southern Poverty Law Center
Spear, Wilderman, Borish, Endy, Spear & Runckel
Street Law
Sugarman & Associates
U.S. Attorney’s Office – NJ Criminal Division; DE Civil Division
U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights & Urban Affairs
Washington Legal Foundation
Zionist Organization of America’s Center for Law & Justice

PENN LAW COURSES

Civil Practice Clinic: Fieldwork
This clinical course examines first hand the challenging issues that confront lawyers who represent clients in civil disputes and litigation. Under close faculty supervision, students will serve as litigators in the Penn Legal Assistance Office, a teaching law firm providing legal representation to actual clients whose interests are directly at stake in state and federal court proceedings and in administrative agency hearings. Students will interview and counsel clients, develop case theories, negotiate with opposing parties, and provide legal representation in formal adjudicatory hearings under Pennsylvania's student practice rule. Students will be assigned their own individual cases in which they will have primary responsibility in a broad range of substantive areas, such as housing, social security disability, child custody and support, civil forfeiture, education, and discrimination and civil rights. The skills and experience obtained in this course will serve students throughout their professional careers, whether or not they choose to pursue litigation practice. In addition to their casework as lawyers, students will engage in classroom seminars twice weekly to obtain training in basic interactional skills (e.g., interviewing, counseling, negotiating) and to discuss in a collegial setting issues of case development, strategy and professional responsibility which arise in the Clinic's cases. Students will also participate in videotaped simulations utilizing trained actors as a means of enhancing skills development. Most importantly, each student will be assigned to an individual faculty supervisor with whom he/she will meet regularly on a one-to-one basis to receive close supervision and constructive feedback. Students will develop competence in basic lawyering skills as well as self-reflection, acquiring an ability to analyze what it is they do as lawyers and to learn from their own experiences

Contemporary Issues in Law & Politics Seminar
This seminar changes every year to cover cases and legal issues that occur during the term and throughout the previous two years. Topics to be covered this semester will include the terrorism cases, the torture memos, gay marriage, the right to die, affirmative action, sentencing guidelines, the death penalty, election law controversies, and other topics that come up during the term.

Employment Discrimination
This course will introduce the basic theories and legal principles underlying equal employment opportunity law in the United States. The course will focus on Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, and the Americans with Disabilities Act: the fundamental federal statutes prohibiting employment discrimination based on race, gender, religion, age and disability. Students will become familiar with the role of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the administrative prerequisites to bringing a discrimination case to court. Topics will include current developments in the law of affirmative action and sexual harassment, and an employer's duty to provide reasonable accommodations in the work place.

Human Rights & National Security
The images and implications of September 11th, Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo Bay are imprinted in our collective memory. These events and their responses raise critical tensions in both law and policy between the protection of national security and respect for international human rights. In the face of serious threats to national security, to what degree do human rights protections still matter? When (if ever) does a state's legitimate need to protect its national security trump its international human rights obligations? From a legal and policy perspective, this course examines interface between human rights and national security. The course begins with an introduction to international human rights law, with a focus on obligations to protect human rights in light of new security threats. From a legal perspective, topics include the scope and extent of a state's human rights obligations, institutions to enforce human rights violations, and the extraterritorial application of human rights law. From a policy perspective, we will ask questions as to the relevance of human rights obligations and how they impact policy-making in the national security realm. The course then turns to issues of national security, examining the place of human rights in the development of US national security strategy and that of certain other countries. We will consider legal questions including the extent of presidential powers in war time, the protection of classified information, the applicability of international humanitarian law to US military operations, and the international law governing the use of force in the protection of human rights. The tensions between human rights and national security will be analyzed through detailed case studies including the use of torture and coercive interrogation techniques, the internment of prisoners captured on the battlefield, and the use of military force to protect human rights through humanitarian interventions. The course concludes with a normative consideration of the appropriate place for human rights in the national security strategy of the United States and examines possible ways of reconciling the tensions between the promotion of human rights and protection of national security. While the focus of the course is on human rights and national security in the law and policy of the United States of America, we will draw on the law and practice of a number of countries and courts, including the United Kingdom, Canada, South Africa, Israel, Germany, the International Court of Justice, the European Court of Human Rights, and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

International Human Rights
This course traces the dramatic rise of the individual as a subject of international law in the post-World War II era; specifically, as a beneficiary of fundamental rights recognized, protected and enforced directly by that system of law. It begins by laying historical foundations, showing how the individual was formerly treated as no more than a mere appendage of his/her State, and then considers the transformation effected by the United Nations Charter (1945), the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and two International Covenants (1966). The evolution of specific areas of human rights will be considered, e.g., elimination of racial discrimination, elimination of discrimination against women, freedom of religion, elimination of torture, etc. In each case, three "eras" will be traversed: (a) that of general principles, in which the notion of the rights emerges at the general level; (b) that of specificity, in which the content of the rights takes shape and is defined; and (c) that of enforcement, in which the international legal system seeks to give practical effect to the rights it has recognized, at the national, regional and international levels.

Legal Responses to Inequality
This course will study legal material as expressive of, and as supportive of, differing concepts of equality and its role as a social value, rather than as simply part of a course of doctrinal development or a system of analytical reasoning. Its premise is that differences in those concepts are often not recognized, and the contestability and bases of one's approach to equality issues are often not acknowledged. Substantively, the course will include aspects of legal regulation affecting the status of racial, religious and ethnic "minorities," women, gay and lesbian people, and people perceived as disabled, as well as, the interaction between the law and inequality in the distribution of wealth and income. It will do this in part by examining "antidiscrimination," "equal protection," or "poverty" law, but will focus also on issues of equality implicit in such mainstream first-year subjects as Procedure and Contracts.

Litigation for Social Change
Over ninety percent of Americans live in urban areas. This course will examine many of the issues facing urban America through an analysis of the role of local government in the American legal and political system. We will consider federal, state and local statutes and case law that shape governmental institutions and affect the capacity of state and local governments to perform basic functions effectively, equitably, and in a politically accountable manner. Specific topics include: the formation of local and sub-local governments; the scope of local autonomy with respect to zoning, policing, and the provision of public services; federal-local, state-local, and inter-local relations; the relationship between cities and suburbs; and the impact of race on the structure of metropolitan governance.