The president of the American Bar Association, Carolyn Lamm, urged "those who would undermine clinical law school programs to step back and remember that the rule of law cannot survive if pressure prevents lawyers from fulfilling their responsibilities to their clients".
Editor's note: Jonathan Askin is Associate Professor of Clinical Law at Brooklyn Law School and Founding Director of the Brooklyn Law and Incubator Policy Clinic (BLIP).
Joan Meier has been a clinical law professor for 22 years at the George Washington University Law School, where she founded three pioneering and nationally recognized interdisciplinary domestic violence clinical programs.
It added a medical and pharmacy program (Leonard Medical School) in 1881, and a law program in 1888.
"Also, universities with undergraduate law programs felt compelled to set up shop for graduate law schools.
Selective graduate programs, including medical, business and law programs, want to build diverse communities of learners.
Immigration clinical programs allow law students to get practical experience in immigration law before they graduate.
Soon after his appointment to the faculty of the Harvard Law School in 1972, Professor Bellow founded the Clinical Program, a law school version of the teaching hospital, so that law students, like medical students, would acquire skills by serving actual clients, and perhaps advance the cause of social justice as well.
Mr. Lehman also helped create a clinical program for law students to assist community groups in economic development and developed a course in transnational law that is required for Michigan's J.D. degree.
He retired as a professor in the clinical psychology program at St . Johns University in Jamaica, Queens.
