A congressional committee is investigating the legal clinics at Northwestern University’s law school, prompting warnings that the inquiry could damage legal advocacy work throughout the country and even the foundation of the American legal system.
The Committee on Education and the Workforce sent a letter to the Evanston school last week, saying “there are indications that Northwestern has used its taxpayer-supported institutional resources” to “engage in progressive-left political advocacy.”
The committee, which last year called Northwestern President Michael Schill and other university presidents to testify about antisemitism on campus, is asking for the budgets and funders for all of the school’s 20-plus legal clinics. It’s also asking for the personnel file of professor Sheila Bedi, director of Northwestern’s Community Justice and Civil Rights Clinic, which works on “redressing over-policing and mass imprisonment.”
“They are asking for very detailed information on a legal clinic that provides services to a lot of people … who generally don’t have a voice,” said Illinois State Sen. Robert Peters, a Chicago Democrat. “And it is very clear [President Donald Trump’s] administration and the Republican Party are testing the waters for something that will inevitably mean everybody could be under this microscope.”
Though the document requests came from congressional Republicans, Peters believes the inquiry is connected to other attacks on freedom of speech and legal opposition by the Trump administration.
For example, one Civil Rights Clinic case cited in the committee’s letter to Northwestern is the defense of a pro-Palestinian activist whom the committee leaders said helped organize a blockade of O’Hare Airport and who has expressed antisemitic sentiments online.
In a statement, Northwestern spokesman Jon Yates said the legal clinic “provides valuable learning experience for students and accepts cases ranging across the political and legal spectrum including this case as well as representing Jan. 6 protesters. Cases that the clinic chooses to take on do not necessarily reflect the views of the university or its law school.”
Yates said the school recently began a collaboration with the nonprofit Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law “to fight antisemitism.”
“There is no place for antisemitism or any form of identity-based discrimination or hate at Northwestern University,” Yates said. “We are confident in the actions we have taken to address antisemitism on our campus.”
Yates would not answer if the university will comply with the information request. Bedi declined to comment.
Peters said he did not agree with the “extreme” statements made by the activist, who nonetheless has a constitutional right to say them. He said he is more concerned that the Trump administration wants to use “anti-protest energy to test the waters for very dangerous, dangerous practices.”
Georgetown University Law professor Deborah Epstein said she believes the letter will, on its own, have an immediate negative impact on legal advocacy throughout the country.
“If you’re a funder and you know your name may be disclosed to a congressional committee if you fund a particular organization, you may decide that it’s easier to stop providing that kind of financial support. It may intimidate faculty, law schools, the larger universities,” said Epstein, who directs Georgetown’s Domestic Violence Clinic. “And it may shut down, at least in some schools or some clinical programs, opportunities that currently exist for law students to get training in how to advocate on behalf of clients and causes that this administration does not like.”
One case listed as apparently “troubling” work that promotes “left-wing causes” is the Civil Rights Clinic’s work on the Chicago police consent decree. The decree mandates dozens of reforms meant to improve Chicago policing and is overseen by a federal judge.
Epstein said it was “a big surprise” to see the consent decree work listed.
“I’m kind of hard-pressed to think of anything that’s more run-of-the-mill lawyering than ensuring that a consent decree is properly executed,” she said. “If that is left-wing political advocacy, then anything that the administration or Congress decides to dump in that bucket could be dumped in that bucket.”
Epstein said what first stood out to her about the committee’s letter was the breadth of the information requested.
“The chairs of this committee know that these kinds of broad, sweeping demands for information implicate all kinds of rights — free speech, free association, academic freedom, employee privacy rights,” Epstein said. “They don’t actually expect Northwestern to turn over the vast majority of information that they’re requesting. Instead, in my view, this is a deeply cynical exercise of power, where the actual goal is to create an atmosphere of intimidation for law school clinics across the country.”