Legal Experience Is a Part of Our Curriculum
New York Law School is a pioneer in making experience based learning a part of our law school experience. While we offer traditional clinical experience, and have a broad array of externships, we also have leveraged our location in New York City to provide much broader opportunities to our students. Every year we offer Workshop-Seminars in areas including Criminal Justice, Employment, Entertainment Law, Family Court, Immigration, International Human Rights, Media Law, Mental Disability Law, and New York City Law. Not only do student participate in in-depth studies of discrete substantive areas of law, they take part in simultaneous field placements so that they can immediately connect classroom learning to practice.
Focus on Lawyering Skills
Starting with our first year writing program, our students have a truly remarkable array of opportunities to practice researching and writing about law in a wide variety of settings. At New York Law we go far beyond run-of-the-mill required first-year courses. Our Writing Program offers advanced writing and specialized drafting electives such as Drafting Judicial Opinions and Legal Journalism.
Moreover, we pair first year writing with Applied Analysis—an innovative two-credit course that offers beginning law students the opportunity to apply doctrine in a series of in-class writing problems that will be reviewed throughout the semester. The course emphasizes study methods, professional standards, and sound legal reasoning.
Finally, every student participates in our grounding breaking Lawyering program. In our required Lawyering class, every student is given the opportunity to apply her or his legal-reasoning and analysis skills in the context of a simulated interview of a client, then in an interview of a witness, and finally in a session in which they counsel a client. This course is a groundbreaking and innovative way to introduce students to the tasks that lawyers are asked to perform. The student's performance is viewed remotely by a faculty panel and critiqued. Building on the Lawyering course, the Lawyering Skills Center offers advanced simulation courses including Negotiating, Counseling, and Interviewing (NCI); Trial Advocacy; Advocacy of Criminal Cases; and Alternative Dispute Resolution.
