The LGBTQI+ Equality Clinic is a year-long, eight-credit (four credits in fall, four credits in spring) course that provides law students opportunities to work on impact litigation and amicus, legislative, and regulatory projects concerning the LGBTQI+ community’s most vulnerable members, including trans, nonbinary, gender nonconforming, and intersex people; LGBTQI+ people of color; LGBTQI+ youth and elders; and LGBTQI+ people living in rural communities.

The predominant areas of the Clinic’s work concern education, employment, and health care. Therefore, students in the Clinic will engage with many federal and state constitutional provisions, statutes, and regulations involved with protecting and advancing the rights of LGBTQI+ community members, including the First, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution; Title IX of the Education Amendments Act 1972; Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964; Titles I and II of the Americans with Disabilities Act; Section 1557 of the Patient Projection and Affordable Care Act; and the Pregnant Fairness Workers Act.

Under the supervision of the Clinic’s instructor and collaborating attorneys, students can expect to conduct substantial legal research regarding the constitutional and statutory provisions; prepare, draft, and edit whitepapers, toolkits, comments, and testimony; prepare, draft, and edit amicus briefs; review pleadings in active court cases; review evolving medical studies and standards of care; and participate in strategic conversations concerning ongoing advocacy efforts with the Clinic’s Instructor and Clinic’s coalition partners in the LGBTQI+ movement.

The weekly classroom component of the course integrates legal doctrine and lawyering skills. Students can expect to familiarize themselves with several areas of LGBTQI+ legal advocacy, including matters involving employment discrimination, reproductive justice and privacy, same sex intimacy and the policing of queer bodies, marriage equality, sex-separated programs and spaces, access to medically necessary health care, the carceral state, military inclusion, identity documentation, and First Amendment freedoms. Students will also take a critical eye to previous LGBTQI+ movement strategy decisions. They will learn how to become more effective storytellers, and how to guard themselves against vicarious trauma and compassion fatigue.

This course is a full-year clinic, in which students enroll for 4 credits in the fall and 4 credits in the spring. Though not required, students who enroll in this clinic are encouraged to also take Administrative Law, Employment Discrimination Law, and Law and Education. Students enrolled in this clinic will be required to attend in-person clinic orientation on Friday, August 23, 2024, in addition to any clinic-specific orientation that the professor may schedule.