Holding the Line on Academic Freedom in Law School Clinics

Ty Alper, Praveen Kosuri, Beth Lyon, Alicia Plerhoples, Laura Riley
& Robin Walker Sterling

Holding the Line on Academic Freedom in Law School Clinics

J. of Legal Educ. (forthcoming 2026) https://ssrn.com/abstract=6433798

Introduction

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[T]his Article describes the foundations of clinical legal education, enumerates the academic freedom norms that have developed over nearly fifty years of clinical legal education’s existence, and establishes why institutions should not deviate from these well-established norms. Caselaw shows that, while it is settled law that academic freedom—i.e., freedom from undue governmental interference—attaches to the institution as a First Amendment right,[14]  the constitutional claim for professors is more nuanced and fact-specific. This Article explores academic freedom not from a constitutional perspective but rather as a professional standard and fundamental norm that higher education institutions and their faculties have embraced since at least the nineteenth century and that apply equally to clinical faculty.[15]

By exploring longstanding academic freedom norms, this Article argues institutions that deviate from these well-established norms are outliers and that clinical faculty should resist external and internal interference not by claiming exceptional autonomy, but by claiming the workaday academic freedom accorded to all faculty whose teaching methods require professional judgment.[16] For clinical faculty, cases are not extracurricular activities or partisan statements; they are the core teaching materials through which students learn how to be lawyers.[17] When universities depart from the norm of faculty-controlled case selection, they do not reduce institutional risk; they increase it. Decisions once governed by professional judgment and ethical obligation become exposed to political influence, reputational pressure, and inconsistent application, precisely the conditions academic freedom norms are designed to prevent. Such interventions also risk undermining clinical faculty’s professional responsibility obligations, including their duties of competence, confidentiality, loyalty, and independent professional judgment owed to clients.[18]

This Article also makes another contribution. The authors are a group of clinical faculty and clinical program leaders from public and private law schools across the country. Our institutions are large research universities that receive significant federal and state support and that have ideologically diverse faculty and alumni who have meaningful influence. We are at national schools that send our graduates to all corners of the country to practice in all areas of law. We sought out and conducted a series of interviews with leaders of a cross-section of law school clinical programs across the nation. We found that these clinical programs operate substantially alike with respect to autonomy in selecting their clients and cases.

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Part II:           Academic Freedom & Clinical Legal Education

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B.     Academic Freedom as a Professional Norm

The academic freedom that protects clinical faculty’s academic work is not special; it is the same as their non-clinical faculty counterparts, applied to clinic work as a core academic function of training law students to be lawyers through actual client representation. Academic freedom as a professional norm arises from the 1915 Declaration on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure drafted by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), a membership association founded in part to “advance academic freedom” and set standards for higher education.[53] The 1915 Declaration specifically states that academic freedom belongs to the individual teacher, noting that it “comprises three elements: freedom of inquiry and research; freedom of teaching within the university or college; and freedom of extramural utterance and action.”[54] The rationale is that individual professors must be free to express their expert views as they pursue and disseminate their expert knowledge, which is not only a core function of the university but also the “cornerstone of the structure of society” where “progress in scientific knowledge is essential to civilization.”[55]

Scholars have analyzed existing case law and written extensively on the topic of academic freedom as it applies to individual professors, positing various theories but ultimately concluding that there is not a single doctrine; judicial opinions are “frustratingly inconsistent and confusing.”[56] David Rabban conducted a comprehensive analysis of existing case law on academic freedom, questioning whether it is a distinct First Amendment right held by individual professors. Concluding that it has not operated as such given judicial reliance on other principles such as free speech, Rabban proposes a theory of academic freedom based on academic freedom as a professional norm.[57] Rabban writes that academic freedom protects faculty’s right to “pursue and convey their expert knowledge.”[58] That protection is not unlimited—research and teaching is protected only to the extent that it “meets academic standards as determined by faculty peers.”[59] For clinical faculty, those peer-determined academic standards often emerge through the collective practices of the clinical legal education community, including shared norms regarding client and case selection, pedagogical design, and supervision that are developed and debated through clinical scholarship, national conferences, and professional organizations such as the Association of American Law Schools Section on Clinical Legal Education and the Clinical Legal Education Association.[60]

Others have also interpreted case law to find that the concept of academic freedom primarily exists as a constitutional right held by universities (“constitutional academic freedom”)[61] and a shared professional norm benefiting individual professors. In his seminal article, Academic Freedom: A “Special Concern of the First Amendment,” Peter Byrne situates academic freedom not as an individual faculty entitlement, but as a principle rooted in the First Amendment’s protection of the university as a site of disciplined knowledge production.[62] Building on this foundation, legal scholars examining academic freedom in law schools—particularly in the clinical context—have also done so relying heavily on the concept of academic freedom as a professional norm, rather than an illusively-defined right.[63]

Universities have also contributed to an understanding of academic freedom as a professional norm by embracing such principles in their faculty handbooks or written policies.[64]  The University of Michigan’s Faculty Handbook, for example, acknowledges that while not all aspects of academic freedom are protected by the First Amendment, the university recognizes academic freedom as a “professional prerequisite” that can be claimed by individual faculty members.[65] Georgetown University’s Faculty Handbook states that the University is committed to academic freedom which “[f]aculty enjoy . . . in the classroom, the laboratory, the studio, the library, and all the domains of their academic activity.”[66]  Vanderbilt University goes further, explicitly stating that it “does not allow political, religious, media, or other influential figures, donors, alumni, interest groups, activists, or any other entities to interfere with the research or teaching choices of its faculty. . . .”[67]

Some universities cabin academic freedom and make explicit that it applies only to “legitimate intellectual and professional criteria not personal beliefs, political views, religious or other individual preferences.”[68] Cornell University likewise recognizes the academic freedom of its faculty, including in the “choice of methods in classroom teaching,” but states that “[a]cademic freedom does not . . . provide license for faculty members to do whatever they choose.”[69] These limitations align closely with scholars’ interpretation of the 1915 Declaration that academic freedom works within constraints— “academic freedom does not immunize professors from discipline for expression that violates academic standards.”[70] Using this framework, academic freedom is commonly understood as a professional norm held by faculty and recognized by universities but bounded by academic standards.[71]

C.  Standards and Oversight

University administrations often view law school clinics as incurring greater institutional risk than non-experiential or doctrinal courses because clinics function, in part, as law firms that teach through live client representation.[72] Yet, like other faculty, clinical faculty do not exercise academic freedom unchecked. Indeed, clinical faculty’s teaching and practice within a clinic are governed by a dense and enforceable framework of professional responsibility and student practice rules, accreditation requirements, and pedagogical objectives.[73] The American Bar Association’s accreditation standards recognize clinics as core academic offerings and explicitly extend academic freedom protections to client representation in clinical programs.[74] Clinical pedagogy further shapes clinical faculty choices by centering student learning through supervised, live-client representation, requiring deliberate case selection aligned with educational objectives within specific practice areas.

Although no single rulebook dictates case selection or litigation strategy, these decisions are nonetheless shaped by professional norms developed within the clinical teaching community and reinforced through peer review, faculty governance, and the institutional structures described below.[75]

These standards define the legitimate contours of clinical decision-making and distinguish it from political advocacy, administrative service, or discretionary programmatic activity. They demonstrate that clinical faculty’s autonomy is already calibrated: constrained by professional ethics and pedagogical responsibility, yet insulated from interference based on client identity, legal position, or political sensitivity. Understanding these overlapping regimes is essential to evaluating contemporary disputes over clinical autonomy and to appreciating why academic freedom attaches to clinical work. Precisely because clinical faculty operate within these tightly bounded limits while preparing students for the responsibilities of legal practice, institutional protection of their academic freedom is not a concession to risk, but a safeguard of the disciplined exercise of academic judgment essential to the law school’s (and the university’s) educational mission.
1.     Professional Standards

As individually licensed attorneys, clinical faculty are bound by the rules of professional conduct promulgated by the state bar associations of which they are members.[76] Although these rules vary somewhat by jurisdiction, they are largely derived from the American Bar Association’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct (the Model Rules) and are typically adopted or approved by the state’s highest court. Under these rules, clinical faculty—and the student attorneys they supervise—must abide by the client’s decisions concerning the objectives of representation,[77] provide zealous[78] and competent[79] advocacy, and protect communications with clients through the attorney–client privilege.[80] These professional obligations require clinical faculty to deliver high-quality legal representation, maintain client confidences,[81] and exercise independent professional judgment. The duty of confidentiality extends not only to information relating to the representation, but also to the identity of the client itself.[82]

In many states, students enrolled in a clinic practice under the license of the individually-licensed clinician.[83] Other clinics—including transactional, policy advocacy, international, legislative, and co-counseling matters—may operate outside formal student-practice rules while remaining governed by professional responsibility obligations, supervisory requirements, and institutional academic standards. The clinician bears the responsibility (and the risk) of ensuring that the students are adhering to the relevant professional responsibility rules. In other states or jurisdictions, such as the District of Columbia, the courts have adopted student practice rules that allow law students to practice law temporarily while enrolled in a law school clinic.[84]

The legal profession has long adopted a neutral-partisan conception of lawyering where the lawyer’s zealous advocacy on behalf of a client is distinct from their personal feelings toward a client or their ideological positions. This is explicitly codified in Rule 1.2(b), which dictates that “[a] lawyer’s representation of a client, including representation by appointment, does not constitute an endorsement of the client’s political, economic, social or moral views or activities.”[85] This essential rule allows all clients to be represented by competent counsel, no matter their actions. An apt analogy to medicine is the neurosurgeon who does not ask who is under their scalpel when removing a brain tumor. The patient may be a mass murderer, a fraudster, a thief; the neurosurgeon operates on the patient anyway because of their professional responsibility to “respect human life” and “treat the sick and injured . . . without prejudice.”[86] Likewise, criminal defense clinics represent clients who are charged with breaking the law because justice requires that defendants have access to counsel, the right to confront the evidence against them, the right to present their side of the story, and a fair assessment of their guilt or innocence.[87]

This is not to say that lawyers and student attorneys in clinics are “hired guns” who represent any and all parties. Client selection is often constrained by a norm of representing underserved and under-represented clients. Indeed, some states also have student practice rules that require that clinics not compete with the private bar by requiring that they serve indigent clients, those who cannot afford a lawyer, or “or have particular difficulty obtaining lawyers because of the nature of their legal problems.”[88] Some clinical programs also have an express social justice mission and largely operate clinics that seek to challenge and remedy injustice.[89]
2.     Accreditation Standards

The federally recognized law-school accreditor, the Council of the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar (the ABA Council) also sets standards for law clinics as part of accredited J.D. programs.[90] The ABA Council defines law clinics as a “substantial lawyering experience that involves advising or representing one or more actual clients or serving as a third-party neutral.”[91] The ABA Council dictates that law schools must provide “substantial opportunities to students” to participate in law clinics or field placements, and law students must complete at least six credits of experiential education, which may include a law clinic.[92] Law students in clinics must also be directly supervised by a faculty member.[93] ABA Standard 208, which addresses academic freedom and freedom of expression, states that a school’s academic freedom policies “shall . . . apply to client representation in clinical programs,”[94] among other aspects of law school expression.

By expressly extending academic freedom protections to clinical teaching and client advocacy, ABA Standard 208 acknowledges that clinical faculty exercise professional judgment simultaneously as educators and as lawyers. [95] Their pedagogical decisions are inseparable from substantive legal positions, litigation strategies, and theories of law reform embedded in client representation. The Standard is designed to shield clinical faculty from institutional or external interference premised on disagreement with a clinic’s clients, causes, or legal arguments, so long as those choices comport with accepted norms of professional responsibility and clinical pedagogy. In this way, Standard 208 makes clear that clinical representation is not an ancillary administrative service, but a core academic function entitled to the same academic freedom protections as doctrinal teaching and scholarly inquiry.
3.     Legal Academy Norms

The Association of American Law Schools (AALS) is the “learned society” for the legal academy, comprised of over 170 member law schools.  AALS Bylaw 6-8(d) declares, “A faculty member shall have academic freedom and tenure in accordance with the principles of the American Association of University Professors,”[96] and AALS Executive Committee Regulation 3.7 defines a faculty member as “a professional who is or was tenured, on the tenure track, or, although not on the tenure track, engaged in teaching or scholarship, including work in a clinical or research and writing program at a member school.”[97]

The AALS has emphasized how clinical faculty have academic freedom in multiple contexts. In 2004, after a prospective client sued the University of North Dakota when a clinic declined to accept his case for representation, the AALS filed briefs as amicus curiae, at both the trial and the appellate levels, strongly defending the clinical faculty’s academic freedom.[98] In particular, the brief argued: “The choice of cases by the Clinic represents an exercise of academic judgment, and is, therefore, a decision protected by both AALS policy and the First Amendment right to academic freedom.”[99] In 2001, the AALS issued a Statement in Support of Academic Freedom for Clinical Faculty. In it, the AALS “reaffirms that academic freedom is critical to achieving the objectives of clinical legal education and that the principle of academic freedom applies equally to clinical law faculty.”[100] In 2025, in the wake of a wave of attacks on clinics, the AALS Clinical Section and the Clinical Legal Education Association issued a joint statement emphasizing  that for clinical faculty, academic freedom requires “the freedom to select cases and clients, develop their clinic curriculum, and make pedagogical decisions about how they structure their clinic.”[101]
4.     Pedagogical Standards

A clinician’s work is performed within the bounds of established norms of clinical legal education. Largely, clinical faculty have adopted a pedagogy called “non-directive supervision” in which they place law students in the “first-chair” representing clients while painstakingly preparing and supporting them to provide excellent representation.[102] This means that law students are making oral arguments in court on behalf of clients, advising clients on legal strategy, drafting court pleadings, negotiating and drafting contracts, structuring new businesses, advocating in administrative proceedings and more.

Reflection is a deliberate and structured component of this pedagogy: clinical faculty prompt students to articulate their assumptions, assess the consequences of their strategic and ethical choices, and revisit those decisions in light of client outcomes, professional norms, and feedback from supervision. Using this pedagogy, clinical professors teach their students to become lifelong “reflective practitioners”[103] and law students begin to develop their own professional identity.

Within this pedagogical framework, decisions about which clients and matters a clinic undertakes are understood as curricular choices made by faculty exercising disciplinary judgment about how best to teach lawyering within a particular practice area.[104]This framework establishes the contours of clinical faculty’s academic freedom by treating cases as the primary instructional texts and grounding instructional choices in student learning, client-centered representation,[105] and professional norms. Clinical faculty exercise curricular judgment about which cases to take and how cases are taught and supervised, rather than advancing personal or political agendas. Clinical faculty’s academic freedom to make decisions about supervision, case management, and lawyering roles is grounded in established norms of reflective, client-centered lawyering.
5.     Institutional and Non-Clinical Faculty Oversight

Institutional standards further shape a clinic’s work by allocating authority between clinical faculty, faculty governance bodies, and law school administration. While clinics operate within the law school and university structure, institutional oversight is in turn bounded by professional responsibility norms—particularly attorney-client privilege and client confidentiality—that limit administrative involvement in ongoing representation. Following the Rules of Professional Conduct, clinic cases are ultimately client cases.[106] The clinician and clinic students advise clients on legal strategy but ultimately abide by the clients’ decisions—as all lawyers are prescribed to do within ethical constraints. Additionally, within the law school, only clinical faculty and clinic students are bound by an attorney-client relationship with their clients. Non-clinical faculty and students not participating in the clinic are outside the attorney-client relationship and therefore, absent narrow exceptions dictated by the rules of professional responsibility, clinical faculty and clinic students cannot share client information with law school administrators and other non-clinical staff as the duty of confidentiality requires.[107] Most, if not all, clinics have separate space within the law school or university to protect client files and confidentiality and comply with their professional duties. These areas are generally not accessible by those who are not cloaked by the attorney-client relationship.

Some clinics have advisory boards consisting of non-clinical faculty or practicing attorneys outside of the law school, most of which operate to support marketing and fundraising for the program but some of which have a non-binding role advising on case selection.[108] Other law schools have developed practices that balance faculty autonomy with institutional preparedness. At the discretion of clinical faculty and clinical deans, for example, administrators may receive courtesy notice of filings or public actions likely to generate attention. These notifications typically occur shortly before public disclosure to protect client confidentiality, and to allow university leadership to prepare communications or respond to inquiries. Importantly, so long as professional ethical obligations are being met, these practices are understood as informational, not supervisory. Deans, provosts, and general counsel are not law firm partners, and universities are not structured to exercise vertical control over case selection. Courtesy notification preserves institutional awareness without displacing faculty/lawyer authority, and it exemplifies how universities manage reputational concerns while respecting academic freedom.

The entire full-time law faculty also has some oversight of law school clinics. This oversight occurs because the full-time faculty (i) are most often the group that approves the hire of a clinician and (ii) vets the subject matter and pedagogy of the clinic when a new clinic is presented to them during the hiring process. Typically, a clinical candidate will provide curricular materials and present their pedagogical vision of a clinic to the entire faculty. Some law schools also have academic faculty committees that further vet the clinician’s pedagogy (including scope of client work) once the clinician is hired. Law schools—through faculty committees—typically also review a clinician’s teaching and clinic work as a part of their promotion process to obtain a long-term contract or a promotion to tenure. Hence, the broader faculty has opportunities to reject a particular clinic, shape its mission, or not promote a clinical faculty member. Most often, though, because of the attorney-client privilege and the professional duties that a lawyer has to their client, the faculty’s influence over a clinic does not extend to selecting individual clients, having access to client information, dictating legal strategy, or interfering in other manners, absent faculty misconduct.

Beyond faculty governance, clinics are also subject to law school (and by extension, university) administrative oversight. Most law schools have clinic administrators such as a Director or Clinical or Associate Dean who is part of the law school administration and oversees the clinical programs, reporting directly or indirectly to the law school dean. Dean suites exercise appropriate oversight of clinics through their responsibility for the law school’s financial health and institutional compliance. This includes setting and approving clinic budgets, allocating faculty and staff lines, ensuring adequate malpractice insurance and supervisory capacity, and confirming that clinics operate within the school’s overall resource constraints. Such financial and administrative oversight, however, is properly directed at the sustainability and support of clinical programs as a whole, not at influencing client selection, legal strategy, or the substantive positions advanced in particular cases.

Other scholars have emphasized that clinical teaching is deeply constrained by the standards described in this Part. As Kuehn and Joy have explained, clinical professors do not have “unfettered freedom” in their teaching, but instead operate within “multiple layers of professional and institutional regulation.”[109] Kuehn likewise has stressed that clinics are “subject to far more oversight and external regulation than most law school courses,” a reality that undermines any claim that clinical faculty are ideological actors untethered from academic standards.[110] Recent scholarship likewise emphasizes that clinical programs operate within overlapping regimes of professional responsibility, academic regulation, and institutional oversight that distinguish clinical judgment from unconstrained political advocacy.[111]

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Part IV:  Survey of National Clinical Norms

This Part describes how the norms of academic freedom afforded to clinical faculty manifest in case selection at fifteen American law schools. It documents a consistent and unremarkable reality: clinical faculty widely and routinely exercise independent professional judgment over client and case selection within established professional, pedagogical, and institutional constraints. These practices are not exceptional, contested, or marginal. They reflect the ordinary operation of clinical legal education as it is currently practiced across institutions.

To assess whether the norms described in the preceding Parts align with contemporary clinical practice, we conducted interview-based survey research with leaders of clinical programs at fifteen law schools.[171] The schools represent a cross-section of public and private institutions of varying size, and institutional structure. Although the results are not statistically representative of all law schools nationally, they capture practices at institutions frequently used as reference points for comparative institutional norms. The interviews were conducted in Fall 2025 with clinical directors, associate deans for clinical education, or other senior faculty with responsibility for overseeing clinical programs.[172]

Across institutions, clinical programs take a variety of organizational forms, but most are structured as collections of in-house clinics housed within the law school and university.[173] Despite these structural differences, respondents were strikingly consistent in their descriptions of how authority over client and case selection is allocated. Clinical faculty uniformly exercise independent professional judgment in building and managing their dockets, including when considering high-profile, unpopular, or resource-intensive matters. Decisions about whom to represent and which cases to accept are understood to be core aspects of clinical teaching and lawyering, not administrative or programmatic choices subject to external approval.

Respondents emphasized that institutional governance mechanisms operate primarily at the front end of clinical programs, as described in Part II. For example, all fifteen schools reported the involvement of the Dean in launching a new clinic; half of those noted that funding considerations and development opportunities factored into the timing of a search and sometimes the subject matter area. The broader faculties then typically approve the creation of new clinics and participate in hiring, reappointment, and promotion decisions for clinical faculty. Once the Dean or others determine the subject matter of the clinic, clinical candidates present their pedagogical vision and the contours of their proposed practice to the full faculty or to curriculum committees as part of the hiring process. Two respondents noted that they have conducted open clinic searches, encouraging clinical faculty from any practice area to propose a clinic. In any case, the hiring processes provide opportunities for robust discussion about institutional priorities, pedagogical goals, and the kinds of legal work a clinic is expected to undertake. Once those decisions are made, however, day-to-day choices about representation fall within the professional judgment of clinical faculty.

Deans and other law school administrators were described as exercising oversight consistent with this allocation of authority. Their involvement centers on budgets, staffing, accreditation compliance, malpractice coverage, and overall program sustainability. Ten clinic heads had no access to dockets of their individual clinician colleagues. The other five had access to the extent that they can run reports to ensure there are no professional responsibility conflicts of interest; this group reported that they did not complete administrative review of individual case files, client identities, or litigation strategy. To the contrary, such involvement was widely understood to be inconsistent with both professional responsibility norms and the pedagogical structure of clinical courses.

Attorney–client privilege and duties of confidentiality were repeatedly identified as practical and widely recognized limits on institutional oversight. Because only clinical faculty and clinic students are parties to the attorney–client relationship, non-clinical faculty and administrators are understood to be usually outside the privilege. As a result, clinical faculty do not share client information, case strategy, or internal deliberations with administrators, absent extraordinary circumstances. Ten schools maintain their deliberations within their clinical faculty; four clinic directors reported having internal ethics counsel who were part of the clinical program privilege bubble.[174]  Only one school reported having a three-person committee that is appointed by the legal services board where the clinics are housed; clinical faculty can approach it if they have particularly challenging cases about which they would like counsel. Where ethics counsel or advisory committees exist, they function as resources to support clinical faculty’s professional obligations rather than as decision-making bodies with authority over client acceptance or advocacy choices.[175] Otherwise, no school mentioned any personnel outside the law school having any input into clinics or their client selection.

Across the institutions surveyed, written procedures for identifying “sensitive” or “controversial” matters were exceedingly rare and required at only one law school’s clinical program. Instead, schools rely on informal practices grounded in professional trust. Many respondents described a norm of courtesy notification in matters likely to generate substantial public attention or institutional exposure. Such notifications are typically directed to a clinical dean, law school dean, university counsel, or communications office and are uniformly characterized as informational rather than deliberative. Their purpose is to allow the institution to prepare for potential press or external inquiries, not to authorize or prevent representation. These notifications most often occur shortly before filing or other public action, not during initial client screening, and do not invite approval or disapproval of the case itself. No school had any approval process in order to take a case, even when university counsel was notified of a case.

Respondents also identified a common set of constraints that legitimately shape client and case selection, none of which turn on viewpoint. Student practice rules and bar regulations often limit eligible clients to those who are low-income, nonprofit, or otherwise underserved. Ethical rules require conflict checks and adherence to duties of competence, confidentiality, and loyalty. Financial and staffing constraints necessarily affect docket size and case mix. Clinics also operate within the general subject-matter scope approved through faculty governance processes. Absent from these constraints were mandates or directives from law school or university administration to avoid particular clients, causes, or legal positions.

Taken together, the survey responses converge on a consistent picture: universities manage clinics as academic programs, not as law firms whose dockets are subject to vertical control. Oversight is exercised through structural, financial, and personnel decisions, while professional judgment about whom to represent and how remains with clinical faculty. These norms mirror how law schools treat other pedagogical choices and reflect a settled understanding that interference with individual case selection would represent a departure from ordinary academic practice rather than its enforcement.
Part V:  Academic Freedom in Clinical Case Selection as an Institutional Norm

As demonstrated in Part IV, clinical programs across law schools operate according to a stable and widely shared set of norms governing case selection. These norms reflect neither idiosyncratic local practices nor ideological commitments, but ordinary professional and pedagogical judgments exercised by faculty within established constraints. The consistency of these practices matters because it clarifies what is at stake when institutions contemplate restricting clinical work. Interference with clinical case selection does not merely alter a discretionary programmatic choice, but it threatens a core aspect of teaching that has long been understood, by clinical faculty, administrators, and accreditors alike, to fall within faculty control. This Part therefore treats academic freedom in clinic work not as an aspirational ideal, but as a governance norm—one that responsible institutions routinely observe, and that administrators can and should rely upon when external actors seek to intervene.

Clinical case selection—free from interference but exercised within the standards discussed above—is central to clinical teaching. When clinical faculty choose cases for current or potential student involvement, they balance several non-negotiable considerations. These include ensuring sufficient resources to supervise the work competently, tapping into their own expertise to guide students effectively, selecting matters that advance clear and articulable pedagogical objectives, and complying with all applicable professional responsibility rules, including those governing conflicts of interest.[176]

Crucially, none of these considerations, standards, or constraints requires clinical faculty to avoid controversial or unpopular cases. On the contrary, student practice rules and professional norms emphasize service to individuals and communities that otherwise lack access to legal representation. When clinics are pressured to screen out controversial cases, that pressure almost invariably originates not in professional or pedagogical requirements, but in perceived institutional discomfort or external political opposition.[177]  It is at this point—when controversy rather than competence becomes the basis for intervention—that universities risk departing from settled academic norms. The question, then, is not whether clinical faculty are adequately constrained, but whether institutions will uphold the governance structures that place case selection within faculty control. This Part offers university administrators a framework for upholding academic freedom while resisting political interference by setting forth baseline institutional norms.

These norms rest on a foundation that is easy to overlook in moments of institutional anxiety: the ordinary, unremarkable operation of clinical programs. The vast majority of clinical cases proceed from intake to conclusion without ever drawing scrutiny from anyone beyond the faculty and students directly involved. No dean is consulted. No university counsel is alerted. No trustee raises a concern. This is not a governance failure. It is governance working as intended. For decades, the default at American law schools has been that clinical faculty choose their cases, represent their clients, and teach their students without seeking or receiving approval from the institution. Individual matters, even those involving unpopular clients or contested legal terrain, do not ordinarily reach the desks of administrators. It is only the rare case that attracts external political attention or generates donor pressure that sometimes draws attention from beyond the clinic walls. Understanding this baseline is essential for administrators navigating today’s political pressures. When a case generates institutional anxiety, that anxiety is not a sign that existing norms have failed or that new oversight mechanisms are needed. It is a sign that external actors are attempting to make the ordinary seem extraordinary. In that instance the university’s appropriate response is to reaffirm, rather than retreat from, the norms that have governed clinical education for half a century.
Norm 1: Universities Do Not Attribute Client Positions to Clinical Faculty or the Institution

Client selection is not a political tool, nor should a clinic representing a controversial client reflect on the host university. This is a fundamental aspect of case selection, and one that is widely respected. Client selection does not represent the views of the institution, nor—per professional responsibility rules[178]—the views of the lawyer. No rational observer argues that a lawyer representing a person accused of murder is endorsing murder or that a lawyer representing a church against allegations of molestation is endorsing rape. Treating clinical case selection as institutional speech—or as a political signal requiring administrative approval—would mark a significant departure from both professional norms and long-standing academic practice. If clinical case selection were understood as institutional speech, university administrators would be obligated to exercise ongoing oversight of all clinic dockets to prevent divergence from institutional positions, effectively displacing faculty judgment with centralized administrative control to ensure consistency with institutional messaging. Rather, many university administrators recognize that academic freedom all the more easily attaches to case selection since it is governed by many other factors and constraints in the professional judgment of the faculty-practitioner.
Norm 2: Clinical Case Selection Advances Core Professional and Educational Obligations

Clinical case selection reflects widely accepted professional obligations to promote access to justice. The Model Rules of Professional Conduct emphasize a lawyer’s public responsibility to promote justice and to “devote professional time and resources and use civic influence to ensure equal access to our system of justice for all those who because of economic or social barriers cannot afford or secure adequate legal counsel.”[179] Association with an unpopular group or cause is itself a recognized social barrier. Universities that restrict clinical case selection in response to controversy thus risk undermining the profession’s own articulated commitments.[180] Across law schools, administrators have historically understood that clinical programs fulfill an essential educational and public function precisely because they engage with difficult and contested legal issues. Respecting faculty control over case selection aligns institutional governance with these professional expectations.
Norm 3: Case Selection is a Core Pedagogical Judgment Reserved to Faculty

In the broader academy, individual faculty are given control over their course content, materials, and instructional methods to maximize student learning, and clinical faculty selecting cases enjoy the same deference.[181] Decisions about which cases best serve educational aims to teach students doctrine, skills, and professional identity are inherently pedagogical and require expertise that administrators are neither well-positioned nor expected to supply.

As scholars have long observed, “[d]eference to the curricular decisions of the faculty . . . nourishes an environment of discovery and intellectual experimentation” and prevents political or public pressure from distorting educational decision-making.[182] Administrative intervention in case selection therefore would not be prudent oversight but instead represents a substitution of political or reputational considerations for academic judgment.
Conclusion

Law school clinics occupy a settled and central place in legal education. For more than half a century, clinical programs have trained law students in doctrine, legal skills, and professional identity development, while simultaneously providing clients with access to legal representation they would otherwise lack. Clinical education is no longer ancillary to the law school curriculum; it is a core instructional method governed by professional responsibility rules, accreditation requirements, and well-established pedagogical standards.

Clinical faculty members face a distinctive challenge rooted in their dual obligations: ethical duties to clients and pedagogical responsibilities to students. The political scrutiny clinics have faced since their inception is not a consequence of unregulated discretion, but of their fidelity to professional and educational commitments that often place them in contested legal and social terrain. Increasingly, however, the source of interference originates within universities themselves, as administrators respond to external political actors, funding threats, or reputational concerns. As this Article has shown, such responses do not occur in a neutral environment. They arise in a broader authoritarian turn—one in which political power is exercised through efforts to discipline institutions that train future professionals, shape public discourse, and challenge state action.

The evidence presented here demonstrates that, across leading law schools, clinical programs operate according to stable and widely understood norms that assign responsibility for case selection to clinical faculty, exercised within dense professional and institutional constraints. These norms reflect not exception or innovation, but the legitimate exercise of academic judgment and the ordinary operation of academic freedom in the clinical context. Treating clinics as uniquely suspect or administratively fragile misunderstands both their pedagogy and their role within the university. Clinical faculty stand on firm ground when they fulfill these responsibilities precisely because of the independence they must maintain in representation and the academic freedom that necessarily attends teaching through casework. That independence can become especially vulnerable in periods of rising authoritarianism, when political actors seek to suppress legal advocacy and enlist universities in the project of silence. Decisions about whether a clinic may represent a particular client or pursue a particular case are therefore never merely local or individualized judgments; they are part of a larger pattern.

When universities intervene in clinical case selection or permit political pressure to shape clinical pedagogy, they do not merely constrain particular programs or resolve a discrete risk-management problem. They deviate from shared academic norms and, often, from their own institutional commitments to academic freedom in ways that normalize external control over what may be taught and whom faculty and students may serve. Such concessions, even when framed as pragmatic or temporary, accumulate. They weaken faculty autonomy across the curriculum and erode the university’s capacity to function as an independent check on anti-democratic efforts. Upholding clinical academic freedom, by contrast, requires no endorsement of particular clients or causes. It requires only adherence to the governance principles that have long structured legal education and protected the university as a site of disciplined, independent judgment.

At a moment when democratic institutions are under strain, the path forward for universities is neither novel nor uncertain. The norms governing clinical education are well established, widely shared, and deeply embedded in professional practice. Upholding these norms affirms not only the legitimacy of clinical pedagogy, but the integrity of academic freedom itself, and with it, the democratic values that legal education exists to serve.