Congress Targets Northwestern Legal Clinics

Legal experts worry university legal clinics may come under fire after a congressional committee recently launched a probe into Northwestern University’s legal clinics for representing pro-Palestinian protesters. Other legal clinics worry they could be next as congressional Republicans and the Trump administration aim to crack down on higher ed programs they view as misaligned with their priorities.

In late March, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce sent Northwestern a letter, chastising the university’s Community Justice and Civil Rights Clinic for providing free representation to activists who blocked a Chicago highway in protest of the Israel-Hamas war.

“The fact that Northwestern, a university supported by billions in federal funds, would dedicate its resources to support this illegal, antisemitic conduct raises serious questions,” the letter read. “While the Community Justice and Civil Rights Clinic’s work is troubling, it is only one of numerous Northwestern Law clinics and centers promoting left-wing causes.”

The committee demanded that Northwestern hand over all written policies related to the legal clinics, including “what constitutes appropriate work,” and the budget and funding sources for the Bluhm Legal Clinic and its more than 20 clinics and 12 centers. Northwestern was also asked to produce detailed budgets and all payments by the Community Justice and Civil Rights Clinic to groups outside the university since 2020 and all hiring materials and performance reviews for Sheila A. Bedi, the clinical law professor who directs it. Northwestern has until April 10 to cough up the documents.

The probe comes at a time when Northwestern is already under investigation by the Office for Civil Rights for allegations of antisemitism, alongside 59 other higher ed institutions. The university’s president, Michael Schill, also testified last year at a tense hearing on campus antisemitism where lawmakers questioned him about the university’s handling of pro-Palestinian student protests.

Jon Yates, a spokesperson for Northwestern, stressed in a statement to Inside Higher Ed that its legal clinics follow the American Bar Association’s standards and represent clients regardless of their political views.

“Like law schools across the country, our legal clinic provides experiential learning experience for students and accepts cases ranging across the political and legal spectrum, including this case as well as representing January 6 protesters,” he said. “Cases that the clinic chooses to take on do not necessarily reflect the views of the university or its law school.”

He also emphasized that Northwestern is taking steps to address reports of antisemitism on campus, including a partnership between the law school’s Complex Civil Litigation and Investor Protection Center and the Center for Legal Innovation at the Brandeis Center to fight antisemitism cases in elementary and high schools. The university also updated its student code of conduct and disciplinary procedures and made new “investments in public safety.”

“There is no place for antisemitism or any form of identity-based discrimination or hate at Northwestern University,” Yates said. “Free expression and academic freedom are among our core values, but we have made clear that these values provide no excuse for behavior that threatens the well-being of others.”

Some law experts have come to Northwestern’s defense.

“Northwestern law clinics are doing their job,” said Hadar Harris, Washington, D.C., managing director of PEN America, a free speech advocacy organization. “They’re teaching future lawyers practical skills to be able to work in the profession.” Students are learning to represent clients, “and sometimes those clients are people who have political views that you may not agree with. But one thing that you’re taught as a lawyer—I am a lawyer—is that every client is entitled to zealous representation.”

Nonetheless, in the face of a congressional demand, Northwestern doesn’t have much choice but to comply and give the committee the documents requested, said Robert R. Kuehn, professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis. But the question is, “What’s the next move by the committee?”

Is it “to have a hearing, or do they think they’ve done enough of a warning to Northwestern and other schools?” said Kuehn, also the university’s former associate dean of clinical education. “I don’t know if this is the end. We’ll see.”

The Implications

Campus legal clinics have a long history of being meddled with by outside forces.

For decades, they’ve come under fire from alumni, donors and state or local officials for taking on controversial or political cases, said Kuehn, who’s chronicled that history in his research.

As early as the 1960s, in the first known case of this kind of interference, University of Mississippi officials urged professors and law students to abandon their work on a public school desegregation case, under pressure from state legislators and the state bar. The professors sued the university and won.

“People have this view that their university shouldn’t be showing up on the opposite side of something that they themselves think is important or correct,” Kuehn said. “It’s hard when education comes out of the classroom and starts to show up opposite some person, either politically or economically, with some sort of power.”

He also believes these external forces misconstrue clinics as political without understanding their educational benefits.

“Law clinics are like teaching hospitals for med students,” he said. “They’re the place where students get to actually sit across from a client and learn how to grapple with both figuring out the law but also interacting with your client and their needs.”

But while scrutiny of law clinics isn’t new, the investigation into Northwestern is the first time policymakers at the federal level have interfered, as far as Kuehn knows.

“I’ve really never seen that before, and surely nothing as heavy-handed,” he said.

He worries the unprecedented move puts university legal clinics across the country on notice and could have a chilling effect on their work.

The worst-case scenario is universities will “clip the wings of the clinic, or even shut it down,” he said. But even if that doesn’t happen, he fears the Northwestern investigation will lead to “self-censorship” at clinics, discouraging them from representing clients who could draw federal scrutiny.

Some leaders of university legal clinics share the same worry.

Georgetown University Law professor Deborah Epstein, who directs Georgetown’s Domestic Violence Clinic, told WBEZ Chicago that clinical programs could lose funding as a result of the letter to Northwestern, alongside other negative effects.

“If you’re a funder and you know your name may be disclosed to a congressional committee if you fund a particular organization, you may decide that it’s easier to stop providing that kind of financial support,” Epstein said. “It may intimidate faculty, law schools, the larger universities. And it may shut down, at least in some schools or some clinical programs, opportunities that currently exist for law students to get training in how to advocate on behalf of clients and causes that this administration does not like.”

Harris of PEN America sees the letter to Northwestern as part of a broader federal attack on both higher ed and the legal profession. The move comes after President Trump issued executive orders targeting law firms who have represented clients or causes he disagrees with.

“To me, that outlines kind of a road map of where the administration is going in its attacks on civil society, and this subpoena echoed that in many ways,” she said. “It’s trying to construe the nonpolitical work of representation and of legal implementation as left-wing political advocacy.”

Harris believes federal policymakers could go after other campus legal clinics, but she urged them to not be cowed.

While the letter “is very worrisome, not only for law clinics, but for lawyers, for universities, for clients, for communities, it cannot and should not chill the important work that is being done by clinics and lawyers around the country,” she said. “It’s intended to do that.”