Rutgers Law School announces 3 new clinics for students

On October 15, Rutgers Law School announced that it will be offering three new clinics called the Mediation Clinic, the Legislative and Policy Advocacy Clinic and the Medical-Legal Partnership Clinic for students to gain hands-on experience in specialized areas of law, according to a press release.

The Mediation Clinic is headed by Felicia Farber, a visiting assistant professor at Rutgers Law School, and was launched in the Fall 2024 semester.

Farber told The Daily Targum that the clinic focuses on giving students skills in negotiating and mediating, which have become increasingly valuable assets to attorneys.

Farber said she has been in contact with state courts and federal courts, as well as the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the American Arbitration Association, to facilitate more opportunities for students.

She said the students have been engaging in weekly role-play scenarios based on real-world cases of civil and commercial disputes in order to get introduced to multiple legal disciplines.

"Most recently, the students participated in a cross-school simulation with seven other law schools around the country to work on a real federal case and mediate that," Farber said.

She said the main goal of the clinic is to help students develop negotiation and critical thinking skills so that they can be attorneys who provide for their clients' best interests.

"I'm very proud of my students because I think in just a matter of weeks, I've seen them become significantly more confident and comfortable with conflict," Farber said.

The Legislative and Policy Advocacy Clinic will be headed by Ruth Robbins, a professor at Rutgers Law School. The official clinic will open in January 2025, but it has been a course at the University for years.

Robbins told the Targum that the clinic will focus on giving students the opportunity to work with organizations and legislators in the law-making process, as opposed to traditional clinics that work primarily on representing individual cases.

"Law students read statutes, and they use statutes all the time ... but they aren't really thinking about how the statutes got to be the way they are or whether they can be changed through a legislative process," Robbins said.

The clinic will have a basis in gender justice, with Robbins explaining that her expertise is in cases involving domestic violence and that the students who inspired the creation of the clinic were researching restraining order hearings in the legislature.

She said clinical students will have a role in other gender-related statutes, citing a state law that she and her students helped pass in which coercive control is clearly defined when getting a restraining order in New Jersey.

Robbins said the students will also be working on the Name Change Pro Bono Project, in which they will be helping transgender clients with the process of legally changing their names.

The Medical-Legal Partnership Clinic is set to begin in the Spring 2025 semester and will be run by Jeremy Spiegel, a clinical assistant professor at Rutgers Law School.

Spiegel told the Targum that the clinic will give students the opportunity to learn how to use their legal skills in the medical field, with a particular emphasis on patients with substance abuse disorders and mental health conditions.

He said the clinic is going to be working with the Camden Coalition and Cooper University Health Care's Cooper Center for Healing in order to teach students how to aid in patients' legal issues that are barring them from treatment.

Spiegel said the partner organizations will also allow students to meet with clients at their facilities and will guide them in how to best meet their clients' needs.

"There are a lot of excellent educational opportunities for the students at the same time that they're providing these incredible services for … patients in South Jersey who really benefit tremendously from the assistance," he said.