Civil Litigation Clinic 2024 Highlights
Judge Nicole Rodarte (l) swearing in students, August 2024.
The 2024-2025 academic year started off with a bang for Denver Law's Civil Rights Clinic (CLC). On the second day of class, Denver County Court Judge Nicole Rodarte administered the oath of admission to this year's cohort of Students Attorneys. Within days, half of the CLC students found themselves in court. First, in partnership with the Rocky Mountain Immigration and Asylum Network (RMIAN), students Abigail Willis and Alexa Wolf represented a client in Broomfield District Court. They obtained orders allocating parental responsibilities for their client, and importantly, formal findings of fact that community partner RMIAN is now using to help the client obtain Special Immigrant Juvenile Status, the first step in his path to citizenship.
Meanwhile, in the Denver District Court, students Alex Lanzetta and Ariell Bachman appeared in a divorce case and in the Denver County Court students Carly Regal and Julia Boccagno appeared in a civil protection order matter. They defended a client whose former partner attempted to vacate the protection order that CLC alumni Brian Parker helped her obtain in 2022 when he was enrolled in clinic.
That covers the first ten days of this semester! Students in the CLC have remained busy, litigating a host of cases including civil protection order, housing, immigration, replevin and family law matters. We are especially happy to have added replevin to our docket, particularly as a means of holistically representing clients experiencing abuse. We’ve seen a rise in the past handful of years of cases where abusive partners abduct pets as a form of coercion.
Students also collaborated with the Direct Action Team, a grass roots group of volunteers in the Denver community committed to fighting wage theft. The Team takes “direct action” in the form of confronting employers who refuse to pay wages before, or in lieu of, filing a lawsuit. When direct action was not fruitful, students in the CLC also represented several low-income workers in court.
Clinical Teaching Fellow Trent Cromartie completed a first draft of his second law review article, Big Data: Guising and Functionally Creeping Toward Civil Death. Professor Tammy Kuennen made progress on a book manuscript, for which she received the Hughes-Ruud Professorship in 2023. The book’s topic is social norm-changing in the context of intimate partner violence.
