Clinical Practicum Courses

This experiential course allows students to apply the legal principles of housing law by spending at least 30 hours assisting clients with housing matters. Students will be placed with either Housing Opportunities Made Equal of Virginia or the Virginia Poverty Law Center, where they will apply their classroom knowledge of housing law, under the supervision of an experienced attorney, to serve low-income residents who are experiencing housing problems.

This course offers a hands-on opportunity to develop strategies for Virginia companies seeking to expand their businesses in foreign markets. Students meet with a Virginia business client to define the scope of their project, identify legal issues, research foreign and domestic laws, develop legal strategies, and then present their findings to the client’s executives and senior management. Law students team with MBA students from a participating business school to prepare international business plans and then co-present their work to the client. The teams prepare and deliver comprehensive presentations of their strategies and the legal issues they have identified as the capstone to their work.

Students in this course do legal research and analysis on cutting-edge, contemporary international law issues and provide advice as requested by international organizations such as the United Nations and the World Bank. At the end of the semester, students present the outcome of the research to requesting parties in Washington, D.C., and/or New York.

This course combines both advanced legal research and writing instruction with a client-based experience and provides students with an opportunity to explore advanced legal research in the public policy field, develop their writing skills in the context of creating an issue paper, and engage in client relations with nonprofit organizations from the greater Richmond area.

This policy-focused practicum course offers students the opportunity to explore and develop best practices for prosecution. Working in supervised teams, students will study such issues as: How does a local prosecutor best conduct a grand jury investigation of a police shooting? What can prosecutors do to avoid wrongful conviction? What should prosecutors say to the media? When might a prosecutor offer a plea to a life sentence in a capital case? Class meetings will include visiting prosecutors, police, and judges. Student teams will produce papers for presentation to the Virginia Association of Commonwealth’s Attorneys or the Bureau of Justice Assistsance of the Department of Justice, or for publication in media of interest to prosecutors.

This course gives students hands-on experience in immigration law through a combination of doctrinal teaching and representation of actual clients in immigration court. Students learn to analyze and respond to an immigration consultation, effectively represent clients in removal proceedings, understand issues at the intersection of federal immigration law and local law enforcement, and protect the constitutional rights of immigrants.