Fall 2020

communities. Recurring instances of state-sanctioned violence against Black men and women have demonstrated how the legal system plays an outsized role in our nation’s history of institutionalized racism. Too often, the law provides inadequate remedies for injustice. During this extraordinary time, however, lawyers and law students are adapting. We are doubling down on efforts to provide essential legal services and accompany communities toward systems change.

Reflecting on the work that UCLA School of Law’s Experiential Education Program has taken on this year, I am inspired by the ways in which students and faculty have met this moment. While adapting to the challenges of online learning and persistent Zoom fatigue, students have been relentless in their advocacy for clients affected by COVID-19. Their work has created positive change in racial equity, economic stability, and access to justice for all. There are countless stories of resilience and zeal emerging from the more than 250 students participating in our two-dozen law clinic courses each year;  I want to share with you a few recent examples that highlight how we are helping to advance these critical issues:

Mitigating COVID-19's Threat to Incarcerated and Detained People

Several clinics are working to address COVID-19's extreme threat to incarcerated people and detainees in Los Angeles County, home to the world's largest jail system. Members of UCLA Law's Bail Reform Practicum, Human Rights Litigation Clinic, and Prisoners' Rights Clinic are part of a team bringing a landmark lawsuit seeking the release of vulnerable prisoners during the COVID-19 crisis. Aaron Littman, a clinical faculty member helping lead this matter, also plays a key role in UCLA's COVID-19 Behind Bars Data Project, which tracks COVID-19 conditions in jails and prisons and the efforts to improve them. Working at the intersection of criminal defense and immigration enforcement, the Criminal Defense Clinic secured the release of an at-risk inmate from a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing center. With assistance from the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, students in the Immigrant Family Legal Clinic helped free detainees from Adelanto Detention Center. And, using a recent order from the California Supreme Court requiring judges to consider an individual's ability to pay, students in the Bail Reform Practicum worked with the Bail Project to reduce their clients' bails and get them out of jail. Practicum students and recent alumni also just released a report proposing alternatives to money bail or the use of risk assessments.

Standing with Marginalized Communities Throughout Los Angeles

Our clinics also are engaging in key advocacy projects on behalf of unhoused persons, essential workers, and the veterans' community in Los Angeles. During a local housing crisis whose severity has no historical peer, the Community Economic Development Clinic released a Vacancy Report that recommends policies to mitigate the effects of COVID-19 on renters and to fund the expansion of affordable housing. As part of the Food Law & Policy Clinic, students partnered with the California-based organization Worksafe to advocate for the safety and wellbeing of the growing ranks of "essential workers" across the food chain. Through their research and analysis of issues relating to respirator and PPE shortages, misclassifications of independent contractors, and the enforcement of California's Safer at Home order, students provided critical support for a Cal/OSHA emergency temporary standard. While providing ongoing counsel to individual veteran and service-connected clients across Los Angeles, the Veterans Legal Clinic also is supporting community coalitions that are reimagining public safety and security for unhoused populations impacted by COVID-19, and the Clinic's advisory of VA policing, which added key insights to a prominent national discussion, was released in the spring.

Working Across Borders

The challenges facing our clients and communities are not limited to Los Angeles. The pandemic's broad impacts have only underscored persistent harms both here and across the globe. Our clinics have responded by tackling deep-seated, systemic problems ranging from human rights abuses, to immigration interventions, to the impacts of climate change. In the International Human Rights Clinic, students worked in collaboration with UCLA Law Professor Tendayi E. Achiume, UN Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism, to research and draft a UN Human Rights Council Report on Racial Discrimination and Emerging Digital Technologies. To amplify their work, students published a Joint Civil Society Statement regarding the racially discriminatory impacts of emerging data technologies and the necessary interventions to remedy them. Dedicated students and faculty in the Immigrant Family Legal Clinic (IFLC) have helped their clients win successful Special Immigrant Juvenile Status (SIJS) petitions, obtain Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) renewals, secure work authorizations, and gain asylum. In partnership with the Immigrants' Rights Policy Clinic, students presented an educational session to faculty and staff at the RFK Community Schools campus covering new public charge regulations as well as COVID-19 relief programs. These two complementary clinics are part of a groundbreaking new Center for Immigration Law and Policy. And, amid a record-breaking wildfire season on the west coast and around the world, new and innovative approaches to risk management in Southern California may be imminent, thanks in part to research conducted by students in the Environmental Legislation Clinic in partnership with state senator Henry Stern's office.

These examples illustrate how, even while grappling with upheaval that none of us foresaw—in public health, in geopolitics, in the professional world that they are preparing to enter—students in UCLA Law's Experiential Education Program have risen to the challenge. Indeed, our program has been hard at work preparing for the new realities of 2020: in less than five years, we have has added more than 20 new experiential courses – including 13 clinics - and hired 14 new full-time experiential faculty members. Below, you will read more about our felicitous new clinics and meet our new faculty and staff; we also share highlights from a diverse roster of experiential courses and introduce you to recent scholarship from our deep bench of faculty experts. Rooted in David Binder's brilliant legacy and driven by this extraordinary community of colleagues and partners, our students are meeting unprecedented challenges with creativity, resilience, and determination.

Allison Korn, Assistant Dean for Experiential Education

What's New

Ninth Circuit Appellate Advocacy: Prisoners' Rights Clinic

The Ninth Circuit Appellate Advocacy: Prisoners’ Rights Clinic, led by Binder Clinical Teaching Fellow Aaron Littman, is a year-long opportunity for students to represent prisoners in cases pending before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Voting Rights Policy & Practice Practicum

The Voting Rights Policy & Practice Practicum, offered in partnership with the Luskin School of Public Affairs and the UCLA Voting Rights Project, is led by Professor Matt Barreto and attorney Chad Dunn. Students work on interdisciplinary teams to develop voting rights lawsuits and bring them in state and federal court. For example, the VRP has sued the State of Texas twice: for discriminatory absentee ballot laws in Texas Democratic Party v. Abbott and for limitations on drop boxes in LULAC v. Abbott.

Human Rights Litigation Clinic

The Human Rights Litigation Clinic, led by Promise Institute Deputy Director Catherine Sweetser, focuses on mechanisms for human rights accountability in domestic courts, including local civil rights litigation of §1983 claims for unhoused people. Already, the Clinic has sued the City of Los Angeles in Federal Court over poor treatment of the unhoused populations.

Community Lawyering in Education Clinic

The Community Lawyering in Education Clinic, led by Binder Clinical Teaching Fellow Fanna Gamal and in collaboration with the UCLA Pritzker Center for Strengthening Children and Families, will launch in Spring 2021. Clinic students will provide youth attending public schools in South Los Angeles with a range of education advocacy, including representation in disciplinary hearings, special education advocacy, and probation advocacy. Thanks to generous support from the Pritzker Center, the Clinic will partner with CADRE and interdisciplinary scholars on a day-long convening early next year aimed at parent and family empowerment.

"This semester has been challenging, but the opportunity to do work grounded in the real world at a tumultuous time like this has been getting me through. I'm grateful that I have the opportunity to learn from such incredible attorneys modeling client-centered lawyering in the face of disaster."

Shyann Murphy, '22, Human Rights Litigation Clinic

Welcoming New Faculty and Staff

More Experiential Highlights

Documentary Film Legal Clinic

The Documentary Film Legal Clinic won praise from the audience at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Clinic students provided legal support to filmmakers premiering The Cost of Silence, a documentary about the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, and were able to attend the Festival along with clinic director and associate director Dale Cohen and Dan Mayeda.

Frank G. Wells Environmental Law Clinic

Students and faculty in the Frank G. Wells Environmental Law Clinic assisted a coalition of environmental advocates, open space advocates, and anti-displacement activists in opposing a luxury condominium project in Glassell Park in Los Angeles. The Clinic drafted comments that focused on the ways development in the Los Angeles River floodplain would limit future river restoration and access, and the air quality impacts on residents from traffic and other sources. The Clinic also successfully advocated for an extension of time for public comments on the project, because the project's environmental review fell at the beginning of the COVID-19 shutdown.

Tribal Legal Development Clinic

The Tribal Legal Development Clinic has responded to increasing advocacy needs for members of Native Nations seeking COVID-19 relief. The Clinic, which is thrilled to train more students pursuing careers as tribal legal advocates, thanks to a $15M donation from the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, is partnering with the City/County Commission on Native Americans to examine the historical context for Natives in Los Angeles and how it has contributed to the community’s homelessness.

Dog Administrative Hearings Clinic

When City of L.A. administrative hearings moved online last spring, the Dog Administrative Hearings Clinic embraced the challenge. The Clinic is the only one of its kind. In partnership with Los Angeles Animal Services, it allows students to serve as hearing examiners in quasi-judicial proceedings regarding dog incidents. While the move online increases participation and reduces delays, Clinic students are working on expanding online access to information through a website that demystifies the who, what, when, where, and why of dog administrative hearings. Due to financial constraints and furloughs resulting from COVID-19, the Clinic will be invaluable to the City in addressing these matters.

Trial Advocacy

The A. Barry Cappello Trial Team at UCLA Law is the No. 1 trial advocacy team in the nation, according to the Trial Competition Performance Rankings. The Team recently kicked off its season by taking the Summit Cup. In response to the COVID-19 crisis, the Trial Advocacy Program, helmed by director Justin Bernstein, created online trial competitions for nearly 10,000 law students and undergraduates whose in-person competitions were cancelled.

Remembering David Binder

Recent Experiential Faculty Scholarship

Tendayi E. Achiume
--Race, Refugees and International Law, in Oxford Handbook of International Refugee Law, (edited by Costello, McAdam and Foster, Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2021).
--Race and Empire: Legal Theory Within, Through and Across National Borders (with Asli Bâli), UCLA Law Review (forthcoming 2020).

Iman Anabtawi
--The Twilight of Enhanced Scrutiny in Delaware M&A Jurisprudence, 43 The Delaware Journal of Corporate Law 161 (2019).

Paul Bergman
--Represent Yourself in Court (with Sara Berman-Barrett). 9th ed. Nolo Press (2019).
--The Criminal Law Handbook (with Sara Berman-Barrett). 16th ed. Nolo Press (2019).
--Evidence Law & Practice (with Friedland and Benham). 7th ed. LexisNexis (2019).
--Lawyers as Counselors: A Client Centered Approach (with David A. Binder, Paul Tremblay, and Ian Weinstein). 4th ed. West Publishing (2019).
--Criminal Law: A Desk Reference. 4th ed. Nolo Press (2019).

Taimie Bryant
--Aid-In-Dying Nonprofits, 57 San Diego Law Review 147 (2020).

Scott Cummings
--Global Pro Bono: Causes, Context, and Contestation (edited by Scott L. Cummings, Fabiio De Sa E Silva, and Louise G. Trubek). Cambridge University Press (forthcoming Jan. 2021).
--An Equal Place: Lawyers in the Struggle for Los Angeles. Oxford University Press (forthcoming Nov. 2020).

Ingrid Eagly
--The Institutional Hearing Program: A Study of Prison-Based Immigration Courts in the United States (with Steven Shafer), 54 Law & Society Review (forthcoming 2020).
--Measuring In Absentia Removal in Immigration Court (with Steven Shafer), 168 University of Pennsylvania Law Review 817 (2020).
--The Movement to Decriminalize Border Crossing, 61 Boston College Law Review 1967 (2020).

Sean Hecht
--California Climate Risk: Insurance-Based Approaches to Mitigation and Resilience, UCLA School of Law/Berkeley Monograph (Dec. 2019).

Allison Korn
--Assessing the Experiential (R)Evolution (with Laila Hlass), Villanova Law Review (forthcoming Nov. 2020).

Timothy Malloy
--Risk Associated with Engineered Nanomaterials: Different Tools for Different Ways to Govern (with Trump, Hristozov, and Linkov), Nano Today (forthcoming).

Hiroshi Motomura
--The New Migration Law: Migrants, Refugees, and Citizens in an Anxious Age, 105 Cornell Law Review 457 (2020).

Sunita Patel
--Jumping Hurdles to Sue the Police, 104 Minnesota Law Review 2257 (2020).

Nina Rabin
--Searching for Humanitarian Discretion in Immigration Enforcement: Reflections on a Year as an Immigration Attorney in the Trump Era, 53 University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform 139 (2019)
--Youth On Their Own (with Cecilia Menjivar), in Illegal Encounters: The Effect of Detention and Deportation on Young People, (edited by Deborah A. Boehm and Susan J. Terrio, NYU Press, 2019).

Joanna Schwartz
--Qualified Immunity's Boldest Lie, University of Chicago Law Review (forthcoming).
--Qualified Immunity and Federalism All the Way Down, 109 Georgetown Law Journal (forthcoming 2020).
--Civil Rights Ecosystems, 114 Michigan Law Review 1539 (2020).
--The Myth of Personal Liability: Who Pays When Bivens Claims Succeed (with James E. Pfander and Alex Reinert), 72 Stanford Law Review 561 (2020).
--Qualified Immunity's Selection Effects, 114 Northwestern University Law Review 1101 (2020). --After Qualified Immunity, 120 Columbia Law Review 309 (2020).

Eugene Volokh
--Anti-Libel Injunctions, 168 University of Pennsylvania Law Review 73 (2019).
--Chief Justice Robots, 68 Duke Law Journal 1135 (2019).

Adam Winkler
--Bank of the United States v. Deveaux and the Birth of Constitutional Rights for Corporations, 43 Journal of Supreme Court History 237 (2019).

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