Evolving and Adapting: The HLS Clinical Landscape

The nation’s oldest student-run legal services organization, it focuses on areas from family law to special immigrant juvenile status matters.

Students represent clients in criminal show-cause hearings before clerk-magistrates. It’s the only legal services organization in Massachusetts that represents low-income defendants in these hearings.

Students represent inmates in Massachusetts prisons at disciplinary hearings, parole rescission and revocation hearings, second-degree life sentence hearings, and more.

Students work alongside judges in Massachusetts state and federal courts doing research and writing related to cases, sentences, and opinions.

HLS’s first in-house clinic, housed in Jamaica Plain, a neighborhood of Boston. The LSC includes the two clinics listed directly below as well as the more recent Federal Tax Clinic, the Predatory Lending and Consumer Protection Clinic, and the Veterans Law and Disability Benefits Clinic.

 Students manage all aspects of a family law case, from the initial client intake to representing clients, in both family and district courts.

Students represent tenants who are facing evictions by private-market and subsidized landlords. In the Housing Justice for Survivors Project, they represent tenants facing housing instability as a result of domestic or sexual violence.

Students are placed in the U.S. attorney’s office in Boston, where they handle work in such areas as anti-terrorism, organized crime and computer crimes

Students are trained in mediation and mediate court cases in Boston as well as conflicts outside of the legal system.

Students represent tenants of and applicants to public and subsidized housing at Housing Authority hearings throughout Greater Boston. The organization started as Students for Public Interest Law.

Students represent international clients who are seeking protection from being returned to human rights abuses in their country of origin.

Originally the AIDS Law Clinic, it focuses on legislative and regulatory reforms to improve access to healthcare for low-income clients, in particular those living with chronic conditions.

Students represent indigent clients charged in Massachusetts courts with crimes ranging from misdemeanors to felonies.

Students in district attorneys’ offices represent the commonwealth of Massachusetts in prosecuting nonjury criminal cases.

Students do sophisticated, hands-on legal work for musicians and other entertainment clients throughout the Boston area.

It provides legal services to clients on issues relating to the internet, new technology and intellectual property.

Students work with Ghanaian organizations that focus on the human rights dimensions of Ghana’s health policies and practices.

Students engage in legal projects with partner organizations around the world that advance human rights.

Students work to protect the human rights of clients and communities around the world while learning the responsibilities and skills of human rights lawyering.

Students are placed with organizations and agencies that work to advance children’s interests through direct services, impact litigation, and policy reform.

A collaboration between HLS and Massachusetts Advocates for Children, it helps children impacted by family violence and other adverse experiences succeed in school.

Originally an inhouse clinic, it focuses on workplace rights, with a particular emphasis on state and federal laws that prohibit discrimination, harassment, and retaliation based on protected characteristics.

Students represent low-income people in cases related to predatory lending and other consumer matters including bankruptcy and debt collection defense.

At capital punishment resource centers, primarily in the southern United States, students represent clients with capital sentences.

Students focus on dispute systems design, negotiation, mediation, and facilitation for U.S.-based and international clients.

Students work on local, national and international projects covering the spectrum of environmental issues.

Working closely with the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program, it offers students the chance to represent clients in the fields of negotiation, dispute resolution, and conflict management.

Students are placed in legal departments of major leagues or sports franchises and with law firms that represent individual players,

Students gain experience in Supreme Court- and appellate-level litigation through involvement in pending cases.

A student-run, Boston-based canvassing group, it partners with local organizers to connect low-income communities to resources to protect and assert residents’ rights.

Students work as legal interns in Washington, D.C., in a variety of federal offices—with a focus on policy, legislative or regulatory matters—while taking a government lawyering course.

Students provide policy and legal services to clients in the Mississippi Delta region, one of the poorest regions in the U.S.

Students learn to use law and policy to impact the food system, and provide advice to nonprofits and government agencies and sustainable food producers.

Students work in the offices of state attorneys general in Massachusetts or around the country in such areas as environmental crimes, public integrity, and major crimes.

Students provide direct representation to asylum seekers, refugees and individuals in deportation proceedings.

Students provide pro bono legal research and analysis to entrepreneurs at Harvard and MIT.

Students work in a variety of settings to protect the rights of military veterans and their families and people with disabilities.

Students work at the intersection of criminal and immigration law.

Students represent low-income taxpayers in conflicts with the Internal Revenue Service.

Students participate in an externship with the Protect Democracy Project, a nonpartisan nonprofit dedicated to holding the executive branch accountable to the laws and practices that protect democracy.