The Civil Rights and Transparency Clinic: A Q&A with Professor Heather Abraham
Published November 1, 2021
The University at Buffalo School of Law’s Clinical Legal Education program gives students the chance to put their learning into practice. Offering diverse and sophisticated practice opportunities to upper-class and LL.M students, those taking part work closely with skilled supervising attorneys to grow their knowledge and application of legal matters.
The Civil Rights and Transparency Clinic goes beyond focused learning and offers additional resources and events to students and local community members, including webinars, community trainings and templates. To dive deeper into this Clinic, we spoke to the Clinic’s director, Professor Heather Abraham. First, some quick facts on the Clinic:
What’s in it for the students?
Clinics can be a lot of extra work, but they’re also extremely rewarding. What’s in it for the students?
- Gaining hands-on experience with the safety net of experienced supervisors
- Learning and polishing key lawyering skills to be “practice ready”
- Accumulating a network of contacts
- Making an impact in the community
- “You’re joining a law firm. We work with real clients, real problems, real cases.” – Professor Abraham
What does this Clinic do?
Students are doing more than gaining practice skills—they’re giving back to the community and strengthening our democracy:
- The clinic represents a diverse range of clients that include news organizations, victims of civil rights violations and more, e.g., The Buffalo News, media entities, and independent journalists
- The clinic itself has a dual mission:
- Civil Rights & Liberties: Advance justice by litigating to protecting individual civil rights and civil liberties
- Transparency: Press for more transparency in government, which is essential to meaningful public accountability and democratic oversight
- The clinic has made it easier and less costly for journalists to gain information that should be open to them
Q&A with Professor Heather Abraham
To get a first-hand account of the Clinic we spoke to Professor Abraham, a long-time faculty member within the School of Law and the Clinic’s director. In addition to directing the Clinic, her expertise includes civil rights, fair housing, and access to justice. You can read more about her on her faculty biography.
For those unfamiliar with UB’s clinics, could you tell students what your clinic is about and highlight its unique attributes?
The Civil Rights and Transparency Clinic is a six-credit, year-long litigation clinic. Our model is designed to give students more extensive hands-on lawyering experience with more exposure to the stages of litigation. This enables our graduates to be more practice-ready when they graduate from law school.
But our Clinic is not just for people who know they want to be litigators. Our docket and learning model are designed for students who want some exposure to litigating before they decide what to pursue. A clinical learning environment is an ideal place to explore whether litigation is a good fit!
Could you speak on some current projects your clinic is working on?
Our Clinic works at the intersection of civil rights and government accountability with a focus on increasing racial equity. Our current docket is diverse! Among our current cases are:
- Journalist Newsgathering Rights: Representing a journalist who has been called to testify as a witness in a murder trial with the objective of enforcing a journalist’s legal right to protect confidential sources
- Fair Housing: Representing and advising a client who has been discriminated against on the basis of her disability while building a “pattern and practice” case against her property management company for unlawful policies that disproportionately impact people with disability
- Segregation: Preparing a strategic plan to use administrative law and other legal interventions to reduce residential segregation in the Buffalo-Niagara region
- Legislative: Researching and drafting legal mechanisms to increase transparency of landholding LLCs registered in New York State that abuse LLC status to hide from liability for discriminatory housing practices
- Court Reform: Drafting and submitting a new proposed Federal Rule of Civil Procedure to standardize the way that courts seal and unseal court records when the public has the right to know.
Will your students be going to court?
Our docket involves long-term litigation and planning. Much of our work involves building impact litigation lawsuits, client counseling, and strategic negotiations to achieve our client’s objectives. Our students most frequently appear in court to argue in support of their motions, in opposition to dispositive motions, and present oral argument before appellate courts.
Last year, one of our students defended on appeal our victory in a lower-court Freedom of Information Law matter, arguing before the Fourth Department.
How do you obtain your clients?
Clients tend to find us through our community presence, website, and word of mouth. Our students and supervising attorneys are actively engaged in community outreach and know-your-rights trainings in the community. We present trainings with and for community partners. We also receive inquiries through our clinic’s client application.
What role do you play in providing support to students working in the clinic?
Our hands-on learning model puts students in the “first chair” role of our cases. In that capacity, they actively engage in client interviewing, client relationship management, and counseling clients in partnership with their supervisors. Our supervisors model best practices, playing a more active role earlier in the semester and a more guiding and consulting role as students transition into the leaders of their cases. This approach empowers students to think through each decision on behalf of, and with, their clients yet provides guidance, structure, and a trusted sounding board when they make decisions.
We wish to sincerely thank Professor Abraham for answering our questions! Students can apply for clinics here. For additional questions, contact the Office of Clinical Legal Education by email at law-clinic@buffalo.edu.
Additional Resources
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