The Constitutional Litigation Clinic has worked on cutting-edge constitutional reform since its founding in 1970. Through the clinic, students not only learn the law, they make the law. Students are actively involved in all aspects of the clinic’s work, including deciding which cases to take, interviewing clients, developing the facts, crafting legal theories, drafting legal briefs and preparing for oral arguments.

Clinic students have litigated landmark civil rights and international human rights cases, including:

• the nation’s first suits challenging government surveillance of political activists
• a successful challenge before the U.S. Supreme Court of Congress’s authority to refuse to seat a duly elected member
• a successful defense of the right of non-profit advocates to distribute leaflets door-to-door and in shopping malls
• litigation that opened the door to greater minority employment in the Newark Police and Fire Departments and in other public employment in New Jersey
• protection of immigrants’ rights
• establishing that non-treaty-based customary international human rights law is viable for abuses committed in the U.S.
• protection of the rights of alternative political parties
• a successful challenge to municipal ordinances barring use of public parks by non-residents
• suits against the state police for unreasonable searches of motorists on New Jersey highways 

Human rights suits litigated by clinic students in the U.S. and in international tribunals have developed new law.