This past March, the House Education and Workforce Committee sent a letter to the Northwestern University Board of Trustees, demanding information about the operations of the law school’s clinical program and, more specifically, Sheila Bedi’s Community Justice and Civil Rights Clinic. The letter alleged that Northwestern was using its resources “to engage in progressive-left political advocacy” and requested that the school produce detailed budgets, funding sources, and payments, as well as “hiring materials and performance reviews” for Professor Bedi. Many clinicians and experts, including myself, considered the request a barely veiled threat against Northwestern for Professor Bedi’s clinical representation of pro-Palestinian activists.
While Bedi and her colleague Lynn Cohn prevailed by filing a lawsuit to enjoin this intrusive request (leading to the House Committee’s withdrawal of the request), the episode revealed to clinicians across the country the importance of protecting our work in the face of external interference. Subsequent months have reaffirmed our need to prepare, as the forces allied against clinical work have worked assiduously to pressure clinicians to abandon their clients and causes.
What, then, can clinical faculty and their allies do to resist and counter political interference? Scholars have developed important new research and resources concerning what legal strategies to employ, academic freedom arguments to make, and best practices to develop. But the limits of legal solutions and the unpredictability of future threats teach a tough lesson. In my view, any successful strategy to protect clinical legal work boils down to preparation and solidarity; any robust shield must center those principles.
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Interference with clinical legal education has a sadly long history. As Peter Joy, Bob Kuehn, and Bridget McCormack have shown, outside forces — legislators, business interests, and university leaders — have sought to influence how legal clinics operate for over a half-century. Some restrictions have taken the form of limitations on funding: for example, a state legislature threatens to pull funding from a public law school because it disagrees with the school’s clinical work. In other situations, forces external to traditional academic governance (such as donors or alumni) have pressured the institution to limit clinical autonomy or academic freedom. In one case, at the University of Denver, the clinic’s representation of clients in a housing discrimination case came under fire from opposing counsel — Denver Law alumni who complained to the dean. In another case, business forces unhappy with Tulane’s Environmental Law Clinic successfully lobbied the Louisiana Supreme Court to limit student practice rules in their favor.
Recent examples of political interference, while resembling these historical incidents, demonstrate an escalation in two ways. First, the federal government has entered the fray; second, the attacks have become especially brazen. The House Committee’s March 2025 request for information from Northwestern, targeted as it was against Prof. Bedi’s work on behalf of activists supporting Palestine, marked the first known pressure campaign from the federal government against clinical legal work. That was followed in July 2025 by an attack from Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) during a hearing in which the chancellor of CUNY served as a witness. Stefanik railed against a CUNY Law clinic’s representation of Mahmoud Khalil, claiming that the director of the CLEAR Clinic, Prof. Ramzi Kassem, should face discipline or even dismissal for representing Khalil.
Non-federal forces have also attempted to influence clinical work. A Tulane staff scientist, working in the Law School’s environmental clinic, resigned as a result of what she described as a pressure campaign from senior administrators and business interests to limit the clinic’s public advocacy. And even within universities, faculty and administrators may now look more closely at what work clinical programs take on.
As I argue in a forthcoming Essay, clinical faculty can learn from Professor Bedi’s case, as well as from the cases that multiple law firms have litigated against the Trump Administration’s punitive executive orders. These orders restricted the targeted law firms’ ability to practice by stripping their lawyers of security clearances and barring the government from hiring them. These suits generally rely upon protections for associational rights between lawyers and clients, as well as the recent unanimous Supreme Court decision in NRA v. Vullo that limits the ability of government actors to jawbone and threaten private parties into quiescence.
Protections for lawyer-client relationships rest on a well-established foundation in American constitutional law. The seminal case, NAACP v. Button, overturned a Virginia professional responsibility regulation targeting the NAACP’s work on behalf of Black Virginians. The regulation prohibited the NAACP’s “solicitation” of clients, but as Justice Brennan’s majority opinion observed, “association for litigation may be the most effective form of political association.” The Court thus struck down Virginia’s professional responsibility regulations under the First Amendment. In doing so, it laid the foundation for subsequent claims — employed by Professors Bedi and Cohn, and by the law firms targeted by the Trump Executive Orders — that governmental interference or sanction based on lawyers’ representation of clients can create severe First Amendment problems.
More recently, in 2024 the Supreme Court in NRA v. Vullo unanimously reinforced and strengthened its rule against jawboning — informal government pressure that seeks to intimidate individuals and organizations in ways that contravene constitutional protections. As Genevieve Lakier observes, Vullo holds that “officials may never intentionally attempt to use their informal powers to evade constitutional constraint.” To hold otherwise would permit the government to suppress disfavored views or speakers through indirect means. While the Vullo rule requires a contextual assessment to determine whether a government actor has merely permissibly used its bully pulpit or tipped over into improper pressure, the retaliatory nature of the government’s recent actions against clinical faculty and lawyers more broadly makes clear that their actions run afoul of the spirit of the prohibition against jawboning.
Beyond these constitutional protections, clinical faculty can invoke academic freedom protections to guard their clinical work. The ABA’s accreditation requirements mandate that law schools respect the academic freedom rights of faculty, staff, and students, and most schools will have their own institutional protections, outlined in faculty handbooks and collective bargaining agreements. The Joint Academic Freedom Committee of the AALS Clinical Section and CLEA, which I co-chair, has set forth principles to protect clinical academic freedom, making the case that clinical work should receive robust academic freedom protections just as scholarship and teaching do.
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While all these protections can help in the face of attacks, in reality they cannot serve as perfect shields. Opponents of clinical work — and of lawyering more generally — have shown immense creativity and willingness to undermine norms to achieve their political and economic goals. The baseless indictment against New York Attorney General Letitia James, the attacks on law firms and universities, the threats against immigration attorneys, and many other previously unthinkable actions demonstrate that the current administration will use any leverage it can find to target disfavored actors, even if doing so flagrantly undermines the rule of law. Given this, in the coming months and years, we should expect attacks on clinical faculty to take on new, unexpected forms.
Moreover, not every attack gives rise to a legal case, or obviously implicates academic freedom protections. While I and other scholars (including my colleague Brad Wendel) have argued for a more robust rights regime protecting lawyers, stemming from the Fifth and Sixth Amendments as a necessarily constitutive element of the rule of law, the courts continue to rely upon Button as the primary basis for protecting lawyers. That may not be enough.
Professional responsibility protections may also not carry the day for clinical faculty or for lawyers as a whole. While clinicians can point to Model Rule 5.4 to protect their independence, limitations on accepting new clients or pressure on the direction of the clinic’s work may violate the spirit of that rule but not the letter of it. We have no Vullo-like protection on informal threats; what remains unsettling is how much political interference with clinical work happens sub rosa. In my experience, much interference never comes to public light — it only leaks in the form of discreet discussions among trusted allies.
What, then, remains for clinicians and their fellow travelers? From my vantage point, two principles — preparation and solidarity — must serve as the foundational elements of any strategy. Only in understanding the nature of threats (whether inside the institution or beyond its gates) and the vulnerabilities that each clinical instructor faces can we develop any meaningful shields. And only in supporting each other and working in solidarity with our students, clients, and colleagues throughout the profession can any resistance to outside pressure withstand those forces. Arguments resting predominantly on constitutional law, academic freedom, or professional responsibility remain necessary but unfortunately insufficient in this moment of upheaval and illegality.
