Legal Clinics

The School of Law provides five different clinical opportunities in a range of topics as described below. For expanded information, please use the links on the right side of this page.

The Family Violence Clinic provides a true hands-on experience for students who will counsel undocumented immigrants that have survived domestic violence. Students will engage in client counseling and interviews, fact investigation, legal research, preparation of affidavits, writing legal arguments, and submitting applications for domestic violence-related immigration benefits.

The Alona Cortese Elder Law Center provides free legal services to local seniors. It has represented victims of elder abuse, both physical and financial, going to court to obtain permanent restraining orders against their abusers. Chapman students working in the Elder Law Center represent seniors in administrative hearings regarding government benefits, draft wills and health care directives, and help seniors with a wide variety of legal issues. Students also go out to local senior centers for client interviews with the elderly.

The Claremont Institute Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, under the direction of Professor John Eastman, provides students with an opportunity to earn independent study credit assisting Professor Eastman with the Center's ongoing trial and appellate litigation. Over the past four years, numerous students have participated in the program, conducting research, drafting discovery requests, preparing draft summary judgment motions and appellate briefs, attending hearings, and even preparing briefs for filing with the Supreme Court of the United States in such landmark cases as Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (the Ohio school vouchers case) and Grutter v. Bollinger (the Michigan affirmative action cases).

Students working at the Tax Law Clinic learn valuable negotiation, interviewing, advocacy and trial skills. The clinic helps the IRS and the U.S. Tax Court in more efficient resolution of tax controversies. In the clinic, law students advocate on behalf of disadvantaged taxpayers who otherwise could not afford representation. Tax law students who have completed prerequisite tax law courses are eligible to represent taxpayers under the supervision of attorney-professors. If matters cannot be resolved, students represent the taxpayer at trial before the tax court or other administrative hearing. The clinic has saved taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars since its founding in 1997. Chapman is fortunate to currently be one of only two law schools in California - and a very small percentage of ABA approved law schools nationwide - to be awarded a federal grant to operate a low income taxpayer clinic. (“LITC”) Our program has been a grant recipient in each year of the low income taxpayer clinic grant program since inception.

Students interested in appellate work participate in the Ninth Circuit Appellate Clinic.  Students learn the fine art of appealing decisions of lower courts by writing briefs and presenting oral arguments before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.