Appellate Litigation Clinic
The Appellate Litigation Clinic trains students in litigation skills and legal strategy by working on federal appeals that serve those who are otherwise unserved or underserved by the legal community.
The clinic accepts appointments from federal appellate courts and identifies other civil and criminal appeals that present complex, important legal questions with the aim to teach litigation skills and advance the public interest by helping secure access to justice for those who are underserved by our legal system.
Since appellate practice focuses largely on legal research, brief-writing, and oral argument, students receive intensive training in written and oral advocacy as they are practiced in some of the highest courts in the nation.
Students also engage in all the other critical aspects of appellate practice, including meeting with clients, learning to listen to them and tell their stories, educating clients about the pertinent substantive law and appellate procedure, developing effective legal strategy, and identifying and addressing ethical concerns.
Clinic students take ownership of their cases, working in teams to review the trial-court record, identify legal issues for appeal, conduct legal research, make tactical decisions for the litigation, prepare outlines of arguments, draft and edit briefs, develop amicus strategies, and prepare for and moot oral argument. Subject to the clients’ permission, court approval, and an argument date during the school year (or while the students are still eligible to appear under the courts’ rules for law-student practice), a student argues each appeal in court.
Students also participate in a weekly seminar that includes learning appellate procedure and effective written and oral advocacy, arguing through legal issues and strategies, and exploring how to negotiate workplace power dynamics and ethical issues that new lawyers often face. Though some students may end up choosing to go into appellate practice, the point of the clinic isn’t to produce appellate lawyers. Rather, the skills that students acquire are the general skills of lawyering: Experience in effective written and oral advocacy and strategic thinking are directly transferable to trial-court litigation, regulatory work, government service, and many other career paths in the law.
The day before their graduation, student-attorneys Josh Britt JD ’24, Moksh Gudala JD ’24, and Jake Sherman ’24 went before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, where they successfully obtained reinstatement of a civil-rights suit brought by an involuntarily committed psychiatric patient in Virginia who was kept in hard restraints for two weeks and then held in complete seclusion for nineteen months rather than receiving mental-health treatment.
The experience proved to be a formative and remarkable one for all three students, who said they were grateful for the opportunity to apply the legal skills they’d learned in the classroom to a real-world case. Working with an actual client also raised the stakes for the students.
“I spent so much time worrying that I wasn’t going to do right by Rashad that I learned much more about the case, its issues, and the legal debates surrounding them,” Sherman said. “I gained a lot of confidence from working in the clinic.”
Law in Action: The Clinic Experience
Assistant Clinical Professor Richard Katskee, director of the Appellate Litigation Clinic at Duke talks about the clinic's work, how students get involved, skills learned, and what he enjoys most about leading the clinic.
The clinic enables students to develop litigation skills by working on federal appeals.
Clinic Faculty
Richard B. Katskee
Assistant Clinical Professor of Law
Director, Appellate Litigation Clinic919-613-7230