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CLIC's 30-year history of legal service

In an old almond warehouse on Second Street, two interns in the Workers Rights Program spend a good portion of their Labor Day weekend preparing for an administrative hearing, drafting direct and cross examination questions and writing a legal brief for a client, who, without his unemployment benefits, does not know how he is going to feed his son or have the resources to search for a new job. The stakes are high, and the community is most fortunate to have such devoted students who continue to amaze me with their dedication to community service. Without the students' assistance, this client would be but one of the ever increasing number of people in our community who are unable to afford or obtain legal representation.

The Community Legal Information Center (CLIC), initially conceived by Professor Edward Bronson in 1970, is now a 13-program organization of the Associated Students, with academic and faculty support from the Department of Political Science's Legal Studies Program. Funding comes from a variety of sources including the Associated Students, the university, the City of Chico, and others. Combining academic course work with supervised experiential learning has been in existence for some time, but recently this integration of course work and the real world has been recognized as a valuable component to college education.

Combining academic work with community service has the dual advantage of serving the student learner and the community. For students who plan to go to law school or become paralegals, it provides an opportunity to see if the actual practice of law is something they enjoy and wish to pursue. Law schools and prospective employers have the advantage of knowing how the student did in "real life." Dean Kelso, McGeorge Law School, writes: "Over the almost 20 years that I have been involved in admissions and student academic affairs at McGeorge, it has been clear that the experiences undergraduates have in the Legal Studies Program, as well as in CLIC, provide a strong background for McGeorge." David Oppenheimer, associate dean for academic affairs at Golden Gate University, writes of students with CLIC experience: "They come in with an understanding of what it is lawyers do and with a sense of lawyering as a helping profession."

I have been one of the faculty/attorney supervisors of CLIC since 1979. Professors/attorneys Teodora DeLorenzo, Dane Cameron, and Karla Zimmerlee also supervise legal internship programs at CLIC. I supervise three programs -- Workers Rights, County Jail Law Project, and the Environmental Advocates -- which generally have six to 10 interns each. I meet with each program staff weekly for training and case review. There are weekly director meetings and hearings. It is time intensive but very rewarding.

Thanks to a CELT grant last year, I have been able to place most of the training materials and resources online for the paralegal interns. The interns are able to read the course materials, take quizzes, and contact me or the student director online at virtually any time. I am able to quickly post and distribute new information to the interns and answer questions with a very short turnaround time. Students don't have to wait in line during my office hours or until the class meets to get answers to their questions.

The Web-based course is not a substitute for the weekly meetings, but it allows me to focus on the case files and the questions the interns have from the reading assignments and quizzes. I am able to quickly see who has read the material and taken the quizzes and to determine what subject areas I need to address. Individual video conferencing to discuss case problems may be available in the near future.

At the California State Bar conference "Pathways to Justice" in Los Angeles in May, Scott Meyer, CLIC's student administrative director, and I participated in a workshop on using college students to provide discrete legal services. Representatives from other colleges and high schools were amazed with the broad range of services we offered and the number of students involved. Several colleges will be visiting Chico to get assistance on how to establish similar programs at their institutions.

Many programs now offer internship experiences in conjunction with course requirements, such as a tax course that also provides assistance to people in filing tax returns. What I continue to find extraordinary is the number of resources that CSU, Chico students make available to this community. Many of the resources are unknown to the community -- until those services are needed. For some, these services actually determine if the client will have food and shelter.

CSU, Chico continues to be a model for other colleges on ways to involve students in community service. We are fortunate to have dedicated and devoted students who, year after year, give thousands of hours of service to this community.

Paul Persons, political science (Person's work with CLIC under Ed Bronson in the '70s influenced his decision to practice law.)