Anika Singh Lemar (Yale), Building Builders' Clinics:

In some significant part because of the structure of American law, both the private and public sectors underproduce crucial public and private infrastructure in the United States today. Housing, clean energy technology, sewers, and rail, for example, are all exceedingly politically difficult to plan and, not unrelatedly, expensive to build. Scholars, commentators, and practitioners have documented and lamented the role that the law plays in that difficulty. In low-income neighborhoods, the problem is particularly acute as crucial needs commonly well-served in wealthier areas go unmet. The places where poor people are concentrated often lack parks, banks, and full-service grocery stores. This essay, intended for an audience of law school faculty, administrators, and donors, argues that more experiential law courses should teach students how to represent private and public developers building things, in service of abundance.

Clinicians, when designing their dockets and syllabi, are simultaneously (a) structuring a public interest practice and (b) engaging in pedagogical decisions about what and how to teach students who are plotting and planning for their own careers in the law. Representing developers, both public and private, fits well into both missions.

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