General Clinic
In the University of Michigan Law School's General Clinic, you practice law under faculty supervision in a variety of civil and criminal settings. Through your clinic experience, you will develop your lawyering skills both in the courtroom and in the classroom.
On the civil side, students work on cases in many areas of the law, including landlord-tenant, consumer, domestic violence and/or family, welfare, employment discrimination, asylum and refugee, and prisoners' civil rights. On the criminal side, students represent clients charged with misdemeanors, from intake through trial. Students also handle some post-judgment issues in serious felony cases. Clinical professors supervise you, but you will do all of the work for your clients, including interviewing, counseling, legal research, discovery, negotiation, motion practice, bench and jury trials, and appeals. You and your clinic partner will have "first-chair" responsibility for your cases and your clients. Cases are heard in the state district, circuit, and probate courts, as well as in the federal courts, and some less formal administrative venues. Clinic students have conducted jury trials in all of these courts, and have taken appeals to every level of the state and federal appellate courts, including the Michigan and U.S. Supreme Courts. Unlike in some more urban areas -- where the courts are overwhelmed and the delays are interminable -- in the courts where we practice the dockets move quickly. Every semester all of our students get to court steadily, on a rich variety of cases.
In the classroom, you will participate in trial advocacy simulations to master basic trial skills. Additional class sessions address the role of the lawyer, ethical issues on law practice, client-centered lawyering, the adversarial process, and other related issues affecting the clinic's clients.
There is also an advanced clinical law program that is offered to students who have done exceptionally well in the General Clinic. These students return for a second semester of supervised case-work. The advanced clinic gives you a chance to develop your lawyerÂing skills working on some of the more complex and sophisticated cases. In the advanced clinic students have litigated civil rights class actions, issues of first impression in the courts, and other impact cases.