Earlier this week, over 80 Harvard Law students (ourselves included) signed a petition requesting more right-of-center clinical offerings at the law school. Our petition sparked a great deal of reaction online, including a particularly vitriolic response from Above the Law’s Elie Mystal. The clinics for which we are advocating, however, are not without precedent.
Commenters have pointed out that some of our clinical recommendations focus heavily on issue advocacy. This is true of a good number of clinics already at Harvard Law School, however. Look no further than Harvard’s Environmental Law & Policy Clinic, Democracy and the Rule of Law Clinic, or Health Law & Policy Clinic for examples of clinics with a strong bend toward issue advocacy. It is, then, not a far leap to imagine a Second Amendment Clinic, a Pro-Life Clinic, or a School Choice/Education Freedom Clinic engaging in similar advocacy work and giving students hands-on legal experience that aligns with their career interests.
Past these, when putting our list together, we did an exhaustive search of clinical offerings at peer schools. Perhaps the most negative response we have gotten online has been to our inclusion of a generic-sounding “Administrative Law” clinic, but this is something that George Mason’s Antonin Scalia Law School currently offers. Meanwhile, NYU Law offers a Regulatory Policy Clinic, and Georgetown Law has a Federal Legislation Clinic which enables students to draft model legislation and regulatory comments. It is entirely appropriate for Harvard to afford clinical opportunities to students interested in thinking critically about the administrative state and applying what we learn in our first year Legislation & Regulation course.
In addition, many law schools have recently started First Amendment clinics — Virginia, Duke, Cornell, and Vanderbiltcome to mind. And as for our mention of a Civil Asset Forfeiture Clinic, Cabrini Green Legal Aid’s Civil Asset Forfeiture Defense Project inspired us (along with Buffalo Law’s Civil Liberties and Transparency Clinic). We note that First Amendment and Civil Asset Forfeiture clinics need not be politically polarized, either. We are confident that the clinics would attract participation from across the political spectrum.
Our inclusion of a Conservative Appellate Advocacy Clinic looked to the Constitutional Jurisprudence Clinic at Chapman Law. That clinic, developed in conjunction with the Pacific Legal Foundation and affiliated with the Claremont Institute’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, gives students the opportunity to craft originalist arguments for federal appellate and Supreme Court briefs. These student briefs are not mere intellectual exercises; they have real-world impact and advance the development of law. Justice Thomas even cited a clinic brief in a dissenting opinion in 2013.
As law students deeply concerned about the wellbeing of our country, we long for opportunities for impact in areas that matter most to us. As future leaders in the conservative legal movement, we desire the opportunity to learn, in a hands-on way, the nuts and bolts of right-of-center legal advocacy. And in an era where originalist interpretive methods have become mainstream and are prevalent at all levels of the federal judiciary, we hope to leave law school equipped with the tools to make persuasive originalist arguments, whether as judicial clerks or in other legal roles.
Right-of-center law students care about helping underserved communities just as much as our left-leaning classmates do. That we find different causes to be more compelling is simply an indication that conservatives and liberals have different worldviews. These differences should not preclude us all from finding meaningful clinical experiences during our time at HLS.
Eli Nachmany (enachmany@jd22.law.harvard.edu) and Jacob Richards (jrichards@jd22.law.harvard.edu) are 1L students at Harvard Law School.