The Appellate Courts Immersion Clinic handles a wide range of public-interest appellate litigation – from civil rights to consumer law to access-to-justice issues to environmental law to criminal-justice, to name a few. As its name indicates, the clinic involves Georgetown Law students in a concentrated, immersive experience.
Clinic students are enrolled full-time for an entire semester litigating actual appeals and take a co-requisite course on the law of the appellate courts, both under the supervision of the clinic’s director and litigation fellow. Students are required to work not only on their “own” cases, but to collaborate intensively on their classmates’ cases. In this way, students have significant input on a range of cases over the semester and leave the clinic with appellate-litigation skills and an appreciation of what it means to be a generalist appellate practitioner.
At first glance, the case might an unlikely choice for Georgetown Law’s Appellate Courts Immersion Clinic: A bartender and her middle-aged mother appeal from the dismissal of their lawsuit for false arrest and malicious prosecution, after being jailed for 18 hours on suspicion of serving alcohol to 18- and 19-year-old cousins at a Brooklyn, New York nightclub.
Mrs. Doe’s journey isn’t over yet, but she is much closer to home, thanks to three Georgetown Law students – now alumni – who took Professor Brian Wolfman’s Appellate Courts Immersion Clinic last spring.
