Quinnipiac Law
Clinics, Externships and Experiential Education
Our School of Law provides a dynamic, hands-on and personalized education that emphasizes personal and professional development. Our clinics, externships and experiential education are an integral part of this approach, offering a variety of opportunities for engaged learning.
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Clinics
Externships
Experiential Education at Quinnipiac
To be a good lawyer takes practice
We guarantee a clinic or externship experience to every student; most students take more than one, either to sample more than one area of law or to go even deeper in a preferred subject.
Connecticut's liberal student-practice rule allows you to start gaining practical experience after your first year. Whether your legal interests lie in health law, tax, sports and entertainment law, environmental law, family law or a number of other specialties, we have a clinic or an externship to meet your interests and goals to set you on the path for a successful career.
Our clinics and externships provide students with key educational opportunities. Among them: the opportunity to become knowledgeable about legal doctrine as it operates in practice; to understand the rules of professional responsibility; to develop interviewing, counseling, fact gathering, strategic decision-making, negotiation and oral advocacy skills; to sharpen research and writing skills; to gain experience in legal and factual analysis; and to hone the habits of reflective practice.
Clinics
We are committed to providing many and diverse opportunities for students to apply classroom lessons to solving real-world legal problems — just like lawyers do. Eight on-campus law clinics, currently covering sixteen different subject areas, combine casework with a classroom component, award between two and eight credits to fit students’ schedules, and are supervised by full-time faculty and dedicated practitioners.
Some clinic students represent prisoners appealing convictions; some advocate for civil rights at the state legislature and in courts. Others work in our tax clinic providing no-cost legal services to low-income clients with a tax dispute. Still others mediate legal disputes while in our newest clinic, students negotiate business deals. All students serve clients – for free — and the public interest while learning how to practice law in a setting that is designed for them to take on maximum responsibility for their clients.
Clinic Offerings
Externships
Our dynamic externship model emphasizes close, collaborative relationships among students, faculty supervisors and your real-world field supervisors, at your carefully matched placement that immerses you in the real world most authentically. You'll analyze and reflect on your field experiences throughout the semester in on-campus seminar classes with your community of fellow externs, examining notions of professionalism and excellence.
We have 19 areas of focus for externships available — offering more than 350 possible placements each year with lawyers, judges, legislators, policy-makers and mediators. Our students can learn how to be lawyer in any and every type of setting where lawyers actually work — in both the public and private sector.
Externship Offerings
Experiential Education at Quinnipiac
Since 2016, the American Bar Association has required all law students to complete at least six credits of experiential courses. This practice was already common at Quinnipiac, given our broad array of experiential courses. An experiential course can be one of three types of classes: law clinics, externships, or simulation courses – all of which allow students to integrate theory, practice skills, and the ethics of being a lawyer. We have plenty of opportunities for students in all three approaches to learn by being immersed in the role of a lawyer.
Simulation Courses
We offer more than 350 seats in our simulation courses every year to assure that you can participate in a simulation course that meets your interest substantively and in a setting of your choice –in the litigation, transactional or consensual dispute resolution arenas.
Currently, we have 14 different options of simulation courses. Some are offered every semester, with a commitment to offer as many sections as needed to meet the demand; others are smaller and more specialized, designed to meet a niche practice interest. When combined with our clinic and externship experiential courses, our simulation courses help us make good on our promise: if a lawyer does it in practice, you can do it as a law student in one of our experiential courses.
Simulation Courses with Multiple Sections
- Alternative Dispute Resolution
- Introduction to Mediation
- Introduction to Representing Clients
- Negotiation
- Trial Practice
Specialized Simulation Courses
- Advanced Family Law – Trial Practice
- Bankruptcy Lab
- Commercial Transactions Workshop
- Elder Law Lab
- Estate Planning
- Financial Planning
- Judicial Clerkship Bootcamp
- Pretrial Litigation in Connecticut
- Visual Persuasion in the Law