From its first year, in 1985, when it was housed in an elementary school, to today, CUNY Law’s clinical program has trained thousands of students by plunging them into real-world legal work.
Founding and current clinics and concentrations faculty and staff (L-R): Vanessa Merton, Joe Rosenberg (’86), Steven Godeski (’86), Cindy Soohoo, Janet Calvo (seated left), Sue Bryant (seated right), Dorothy Matthew, Alizabeth Newman (’91), Paul O’Neil, Ann Cammett (’00), Rick Rossein.
While growing and evolving, the program has stayed true to the ideals that shaped it, and has served the public interest in countless ways.
The program has consistently been recognized for its innovative integration of theory and practice. It is now ranked third in the nation for clinical training by U.S. News & World Report and is the top-ranked clinical program in New York State.
“The whole concept of CUNY Law was learning through working on people’s actual problems in areas where there was a dearth of any kind of available services for people,” explains Vanessa Merton, one of the founders of the clinical program. “It was a birth—and like all births, it was very messy and did not go according to plan, but it was the privilege of my life to be part of CUNY Law.”
Merton, now at Pace Law School, several other founders, and current faculty members shared the stories of three decades of the program’s beginnings, triumphs, and setbacks. CUNY Law’s clinical program was born at a time when clinical legal education was just starting to get a foothold in the curriculum. For most law schools back in the mid-1980s, such programs were an add-on. For CUNY Law, clinics would become an integral part of learning and practice.
“No other model existed for it,” says Paul O’Neil, who, together with Merton, started the Health in the Workplace Clinic. “It was an extraordinary opportunity for students to work with professionals in the field.”
CUNY Law professors Rick Rossein, Sue Bryant, Janet Calvo, and Beryl Blaustone, along with Merton and O’Neil (now at Human Rights in China in New York), pioneered the clinical program. What were called “concentrations” at CUNY Law started first in the spring of 1985. At that time, students had the opportunity to work at an outside law firm or government agency for credit during their second year; they would also participate in an intensive seminar program that examined the theory, doctrine, and lawyering skills related to the practice of a substantive area. Equality, housing, and administrative law were the first concentrations. These were followed by criminal justice, health law, and, much later, family law.
Some concentrations have come and gone over the three decades. Housing lasted just a few years. Others morphed into new forms, such as criminal justice, now the Criminal Defense Clinic. Some concentrations replaced clinics along the way. The concentrations continue to evolve. In December 2015, CUNY Law faculty voted to change the names of the concentrations to “practice clinics” to better reflect the clinical program’s coherence.
Rossein praises the efforts of his students, who have worked on several landmark cases, including the historic 2013 Floyd v. City of New York lawsuit that challenged the New York City Police Department’s stop-and-frisk program. “Students come out with a tremendous set of skills,” says Rossein, now director of the Equality & Justice Practice Clinic.
Merton credits Howard Lesnick (currently at the University of Pennsylvania Law School) with shaping the philosophical foundations of CUNY Law’s clinical program: to focus on experiential learning and be more immersive than similar programs at other schools. The approach was crucial to the law school’s mission to train public interest lawyers.
“We knew they would be given a lot of responsibility as beginning lawyers,” says Bryant, “and we felt a responsibility to prepare them for that.”
Students also helped develop the clinical program in its early days, including the law school’s first graduating class of 1986.
“We were all in a canoe headed down the river,” Merton recalls, “and we were building the canoe as we went. The students played a key role in shaping our agenda. I think what emerged was a hell of a program.”
Joe Rosenberg, now associate dean of clinical programs, was a member of that first graduating class.
“We were all working together; it was not a prepackaged student experience,” Rosenberg recalls of the nascent clinical programs. “We were part of a law firm, and we would make collective decisions about cases we took and projects we worked on.”
In 1986, the law school moved to a former junior high school on Main Street in Flushing, inspiring the name Main Street Legal Services and providing a space where students could feel like they were working at a law office and not in a law school.
The real-world experiences took students to union group meetings, housing court, prisons—anywhere that clients needed services.
For example, Bryant’s Battered Women’s Rights Clinic often brought her and her students to prisons, where they worked on clemency petitions with clients serving time for assaulting and killing their batterers. “The students learned the importance of listening to clients and telling their stories, even when an immediate victory was denied,” she notes.
Many of CUNY Law’s clinical programs have led to lasting changes in law or social programs. The Economic Justice Project (EJP) has helped keep hundreds of CUNY students in school, advocating successfully for a law allowing college study to fulfill the work requirements that must be met by recipients of welfare benefits. The Criminal Defense Clinic has trained many of the public defenders in New York City and around the United States. The Community & Economic Development Clinic, often partnering with community-based organizations, has helped low-income tenants in gentrifying neighborhoods in the city.
Undocumented people in New York are eligible for Medicaid because of a case Calvo worked on, first at NYU Law and then upon her arrival at CUNY Law. Steve Loffredo, who collaborated with Calvo, notes that “in New York, when undocumented people receive Medicaid, it’s largely through the efforts of Janet. Few people know that.”
The clinical program has also had its share of notable figures. Rhonda Copelon was one such giant. Copelon, a legendary human rights lawyer who died in 2010, founded the International Women’s Human Rights Clinic in 1992 and is recognized for her pioneering work with students, which included winning the right for foreign plaintiffs to sue individuals in U.S. courts for human rights violations and supporting cases that led international tribunals to declare rape a form of torture.
“Her work was pathbreaking,” Bryant says. “Women’s issues at that time were viewed as private, not public, and not related to state human rights violations. She was one of the first to see the persecution of women as a way to exercise dominion over populations.”
Haywood Burns, another giant, was dean from 1987 to 1994, a period during which the clinical program grew substantially. Burns first taught at the law school in the Equality program, drawing from his substantial civil rights advocacy to teach the next generation of civil rights lawyers.
As new social problems emerge, the clinical program finds ways to address them. Wage theft and employers who require workers to live in company-owned houses are two of the new legal fronts that clinics are tackling.
The program’s reputation is impressive. Ever since U.S. News & World Report started ranking law school clinical programs, CUNY Law’s has been among the top 10 in the nation. Over the past three decades, CUNY Law students have served thousands of clients who otherwise could not have afforded representation. And these students have found opportunities to press for systemic change.
Says Rosenberg: “Employers who have hired CUNY Law graduates will tell you that they are ready to hit the ground running when they get out of law school.”