Bringing Law to Life Clinical Education
Bet Tzedek
Civil Litigation Clinic cardozo.yu.edu/civillitigationclinic
One of the first Cardozo Law clinics, Bet Tzedek takes its name from the Hebrew word meaning “House of Justice.” Each year, students represent elderly and disabled individuals seeking health, disability and housing benefits and disability-related accomodations that they need to live independently—benefits and accommodations that they could not obtain without clinic assistance.
565,000 New York City residents with disabilities under the age of 65*
1 million New York City senior citizens*
Students in the Bet Tzedek Legal Services Clinic have worked on cases such as these: •
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n 85-year-old woman faced forced placement in a nursing home because A Medicaid would no longer provide the home-care services that made it
1.8 million
possible for her to remain in her home of 45 years. Number of unrepresented litigants in Children and adults with severe, multiple impairments, including the inability New York State Court civil matters** to speak, were being denied essential augmentative communication devices under a newly implemented New York State Medicaid policy. A young man with AIDS was threatened with eviction by his landlord, who, despite having accepted rent from the man, claimed he was not a tenant. *U.S. Census Bureau **New York State Unified Court System A class of thousands of elderly and disabled New York City residents needed assistance to restore critically important rent benefits that they lost when their disabilities interfered with their timely submission of their benefit renewal documents.
In each of these cases, students in the Bet Tzedek Civil Litigation Clinic were successful in protecting the interests of their clients and regaining for them their health benefits, homes and independence. In the clinic, students also identify systemic problems affecting thousands of similarly situated people, and their findings often result in class action lawsuits aimed at correcting these issues. As a result of Bet Tzedek class actions, thousands of New Yorkers have been protected from arbitrary reductions in their home-care services; the U.S. Social Security Administration has changed its restrictive policies for determining when individuals living with HIV are eligible for benefits; and hundreds of disabled applicants for public housing have been protected from the public housing authority’s intrusion into their confidential medical records. The clinic operates with 14-16 students and two full-time faculty members. Together, students interview and counsel clients, write and argue motions, engage in discovery, represent clients in federal mediation and conduct hearings and trials. Students also take a year-long seminar on civil litigation theory and practice, learning the skills and substantive law that they use in representing clinic clients and addressing the ethical issues they are likely to face as advocates.
For more information about the Bet Tzedek Legal Services Clinic, contact Leslie Salzman at salzman@yu.edu.
Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law • Yeshiva University 55 Fifth Avenue • New York, NY 10003
cardozo.yu.edu /cardozolaw /cardozolawschool