Professor: Markowitz
Credits: 5 per semester (3 clinical, 2 academic)
Pre/Corequisites: Prior coursework, and/or work experience, in immigration law is preferred but not required.

The Immigration Justice Clinic is a year-long intensive live client clinic in which students represent immigrants facing deportation in the federal immigration courts and in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.

The clinic’s docket focuses on immigrants facing deportation because of encounters with the criminal justice system. The nation’s harsh deportation laws are at their harshest when immigrants have criminal convictions. Even long-term permanent residents (green card holders), who have lived in the United States since childhood, can face permanent exile from their children, homes, and livelihoods for matters as minor as turnstile jumping or shoplifting candy.

In the cases before the immigration courts, students may have the opportunity to conduct trials, examine witnesses, and draft and argue motions. In the cases before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, students have the opportunity to brief and possibly argue important questions of law that may impact, not only the lives of our clients, but all immigrants facing deportation in the jurisdiction of the Second Circuit. Students also gain other important lawyering skills pertaining to interviewing, client counseling, negotiating, legal research and writing, cross-cultural lawyering, trial techniques, and appellate advocacy.

In this clinic, students perform all aspects of their client’s representation together with a colleague and under the intensive supervision of a practicing attorney and full-time member of the Cardozo clinical faculty. The seminar associated with the clinic will cover some substantive aspects of immigration law, lawyering skills development, ethical issues, and social/political analysis of the immigration laws and procedures affecting our clients.