In-Person Participation Requirement:
Participation in a DLS clinical program involves a mix of activities including seminars, research & writing, client work, public legal education and community outreach. Students are expected to available for clinic work Monday - Thursday during regular business hours and be available to work remotely on Fridays. Please note from students in this course may have to attend the clinic in-person on occasional Fridays to meet with clients and perform other clinical work if the work is urgent and cannot be completed virtually. Students will also be required to represent clients in live proceedings at courts and tribunals as well as deliver public legal education and engage in community outreach at locations accessible by transit in the City of Toronto. Should you have any questions or concerns about this in-person participation requirement, please contact us at law.dls@utoronto.ca.
Schedule: Weekly seminar (Wednesdays 2:10-4:00 pm) plus a mandatory Joint Clinic Professionalism Training on (Date TBD).
Enrollment Notes: This course does not require an application. Enrollment in all the clinics for credit is limited to upper year students. Exchange Students are not eligible to participate in clinics.
Enrolling in a DLS clinic is a serious commitment. Once enrolment is confirmed, students will require permission from the Faculty to withdraw.
Course Description:
This part-time, full-year clinical education program offers students the opportunity to explore legal principles and social policy issues in an empirical, public interest context. The program challenges students to examine issues with respect to the many intersections of law and social inequality in a critical way, while at the same time allowing them to develop the professional and ethical literacy which is essential to the practice of law. Through their clinical work, individualized tutorials, substantive training sessions and course seminars, students are provided with the chance to test relationships between legal rules and the realities of the justice process, to investigate the complex legal problems and policy issues which affect low-income communities, and to develop a conceptual and empirical understanding of public interest lawyering.
As members of a team that fights to protect and extend the rights of students and low-income persons who do not own their housing, students in the Housing Law and Income Security Clinic will have the opportunity to help tenants and/or co-op members resolve legal disputes with their housing providers, including: evictions; maintenance and repair problems; harassment, and discrimination. The casework will include client counseling; case theory formulation; drafting applications; preparing for hearings; litigation strategy; negotiating with opposing counsel; and conducting hearings where possible and/or necessary.
For many renters, the ability to pay for housing is inextricably linked with the receipt of social benefits or public pension income. Students will have the opportunity to advise clients about issues critical to their livelihood, such as benefit eligibility, clawbacks, and overpayments, and to represent clients in appealing denials of essential benefits.
Students in the Housing Law and Income Security Clinic regularly appear before the Landlord and Tenant Board to conduct hearings and participate in mediations. The same students also appear before the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario, the Social Benefits Tribunal, Small Claims Court in a variety of proceedings that include settlement conferences, motions, trials, and enforcement actions. The clinic’s outreach activities frequently include community organizing work with groups of tenants facing a common legal issue together, as well as attendance at satellite clinics to offer services in the community to homeless or marginally housed clients.
Substantive rental and co-operative housing law builds on principles of contract, property, and tort law introduced in first year, but in a way that is relevant to the approximately one-half of Toronto’s households (and majority of post-secondary students) who do not own their homes. Students will be required to examine the private and public law mechanisms that cause homelessness, while assisting clients for whom homelessness is often a prior experience and/or a future possibility.
The law of income security draws mainly on administrative concepts of statutory interpretation and procedural fairness, but intersects with constitutional and human rights law. Students will explore the policies underlying social assistance and pensions which cause or contribute to poverty among equity-seeking groups, especially disabled persons.
Suggested Pre or Co-Requisites: Administrative Law, Evidence Law
The program is conducted at Downtown Legal Services, a community legal clinic operated by the Faculty of Law which provides services to low-income people in a number of areas of law. In addition to the casework described above, students will participate in weekly education sessions throughout the term. These sessions will include substantive legal training, case rounds and multi-disciplinary seminars. Credit students are also required to participate in the clinic’s community outreach program and to write a series of short reflective papers.
Commitment:
While we strive to make the overall workload of the clinic comparable to a course of similar weight, the clinic involves real case work, with deadlines that are not always within our control. It also involves serious commitments to clients who are dealing with significant legal issues. In this sense, the clinic requires a commitment beyond what is normally expected in an academic seminar. The credit weighting of this course is designed to reflect this additional commitment.
Participation in all seminars and training sessions is mandatory. In addition to the weekly seminar, students are required to be in regular contact with the clinic to monitor developments on their files and to commit to a 2-hour weekly “office hours” shift during which time they will be available to receive client calls (these calls can be received remotely). Students should expect that their clinic work will often require additional time over and above this block.
