Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2026

DOI

10.2139/ssrn.6433798

Abstract

Since the emergence of modern clinical legal education, law school clinics have periodically faced political interference in their selection of clients and cases, interference that threatens clinics’ essential dual missions of training practice-ready lawyers and providing legal services to marginalized clients who would otherwise lack representation. While such pressure is not new, contemporary threats differ in scale and institutional form. Today, funding, oversight, and enforcement mechanisms are weaponized in an attempt to discipline universities, heightening institutional anxiety and prompting some universities to contemplate preemptive constraints on clinic autonomy in the name of risk management and reputational protection. This shift to purposeful targeting to force widespread internal capitulation poses distinct risks to academic governance and faculty independence and must be considered within the broader anti-democratic authoritarian turn that seeks to control what universities teach and whom they allow clinical faculty and students to represent.

This Article examines this modern iteration of political interference and argues that preemptive institutional constraints undermine settled professional, pedagogical, faculty governance, and academic freedom norms. Clinical faculty operate at the intersection of legal practice and academic instruction. Their decisions about client and case selection are not self-serving or partisan statements; they are core pedagogical judgments governed by dense and overlapping frameworks of professional responsibility rules, accreditation standards, and clinical teaching norms that have developed over more than fifty years of clinical practice. While this Article notes moments of political interference and internal capitulation, it also identifies moments of resistance—when universities and their law schools championed both clinical and doctrinal faculty autonomy, faced down political agitators in an effort to create robust client representation and classroom dialogue, and fended off intrusions on academic freedom.

Drawing on original interview-based research with leaders of fifteen law school clinical programs, the Article also provides comparative evidence of how clinics actually operate. It shows that clinical programs exercise substantial autonomy over client and case selection in accordance with shared best practices that are widely understood, institutionally unremarkable, and aligned with the professional responsibilities of practicing attorneys. That autonomy is neither exceptional nor unbounded. Rather, it reflects the professional and pedagogical norms necessary to ensure ethical compliance, effective teaching, and meaningful access to justice—while inevitably exposing institutions to criticism when clinics represent unpopular clients.

The Article concludes that protecting clinical autonomy does not require special treatment of clinics, only fidelity to ordinary academic freedom principles. When universities depart from these norms, they do not reduce institutional risk; they normalize political control over academic judgment, threatening not only clinical education but also faculty governance and the democratic role of the university itself. This Article urges universities, their boards, their administrators, and their faculty to “hold the line” in defending academic freedom.

Publication Citation

Forthcoming in the Journal of Legal Education

Download

Share

COinS