The year-long, eight-credit course will provide Maryland Carey Law students with opportunities to advocate on behalf of the LGBTQI+ community’s most vulnerable members.
The University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law is launching an LGBTQI+ Equality Clinic in the fall 2024 semester. The year-long, eight-credit course will provide law students with opportunities to advocate on behalf of the LGBTQI+ community’s most vulnerable members, including trans, nonbinary, gender nonconforming, and intersex people; LGBTQI+ people of color; LGBTQI+ youth; and LGBTQI+ people living in regressive communities.
The clinic is a notable complement to the offerings in Maryland Carey Law’s top-ranked Clinical Law Program.
“The establishment and enforcement of legal protections for members of the LGBTQI+ community is a fundamental civil rights issue,” said professor Leigh Goodmark, JD, director of the Clinical Law Program. “Adding the LGBTQI+ Equality Clinic underscores our commitment to ensuring access to justice as broadly as we can and gives students the opportunity to engage with some of the cutting-edge civil rights issues being litigated today.”
Leading the clinic is Anya Marino JD ’12, director of LGBTQI Equality at the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) in Washington, D.C. Under Marino’s supervision, clinic students will work in collaboration with the NWLC’s gender justice advocacy attorneys, focusing primarily on LGBTQI+ equality in education, employment, and health care. The experience will include legal research; preparing, drafting, and editing whitepapers, toolkits, comments, testimony, and amicus briefs; reviewing pleadings in active court cases; and learning about evolving medical studies and standards of care.