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This policy practicum will provide students the opportunity to be part of designing and operationalizing an innovative approach to alternative education in San Mateo County. Students will work closely with the County Office of Education, the San Mateo Community College District and the Youth Law Center. Participants in the practicum will be involved in supporting the San Mateo County Office of Education (SMCOE) as it re-envisions its alternative education program. In California, the County Office of Education is responsible for educational programs for certain students that are not attending school within their school district. This includes incarcerated students and students who have been referred to the County-run alternative school based on an expulsion from their district due to a disciplinary incident, a referral from the truancy review board, or through their involvement in the juvenile justice system. One of the alternative schools overseen by SMCOE is the community school-Gateway. SMCOE would like to completely redesign the Gateway program while, at the same time, consider changes and improvements in the entire alternative education system, including how students enter the County program and transition out of the program. SMCOE is particularly interested in increasing its collaboration with the community college district, which offers an exciting opportunity for an innovative approach that could be replicated throughout the state. SMCOE has already engaged the National Equity Project to begin this redesign process. Practicum students will work in collaboration with SMCOE, the community college district, the Youth Law Center and the National Equity Project to support the design and implementation of a reimagined alternative school program. Students will conduct research on legal issues, funding, best practices and models from other jurisdictions. They will provide a written to report to SMCOE to assist them in making the new vision a reality. They will also document all steps in the redesign and implementation process to create a useful tool for other counties who might wish to engage in a redesign of their alternative education program. (Note: this final portion of the project will likely be completed in the spring quarter, with both new and continuing students.). In the Winter Quarter, graduate and professional students from law, education, and public policy are invited to apply. R credit (Section 02) is possible only by consent of the instructor. After the Winter Quarter begins, students accepted into the course can transfer from section (01) into section (02), which meets the R requirement, with consent of the instructor. Winter quarter students will have completed internal research memos. The role of spring quarter students will be to synthesize that research and create a public-facing set of recommendations. During the spring quarter we will have the opportunity to present draft recommendations to community partners before finalizing a report for the County Superintendent and County Board of Education. The class will be primarily made up of continuing students but there will be a few spaces available for new students to join, with the instructor's permission. Our weekly meeting time will be determined once we have our student cohort finalized. The weekly meeting times may include a full class meeting and additional small group meetings. Elements used in grading: Attendance, performance, class participation, written assignments. CONSENT APPLICATION: To apply for this course, students must submit a Consent Application Form at SLS Registrar https://registrar.law.stanford.edu/. See the Consent Application Form for instructions and the submission deadline.

Globally, more than 1 billion people rely on seafood, yet this source of vital nutrition is chronically neglected in discussions about the future of food systems. In 2021, the UN Food Systems Summit brought international attention to the potential of "blue foods," thanks in part to insights and evidence provided by the Stanford-led Blue Food Assessment. Now, the Indonesian Ministry of National Development Planning has asked Stanford to help them build blue foods into Indonesia's national development strategy. Indonesia is the 4th most populous country, home to 278 million people and the most marine biodiversity on the planet. Over the next 18 months, we will work with the Ministry, Indonesian researchers, and NGO partners to develop a Blue Food Assessment for Indonesia that can help policymakers realize the potential of blue foods to meet pressing food system priorities -- improving nutrition, food security, and livelihoods, both nationally and in rural communities. This Blue Foods Action Lab is the first of a series to help Indonesia implement a far-reaching national program that could transform its food system and could be used as a model for other countries. For Spring quarter the role of the students will be to evaluate successful programs implemented by other nations in the areas that align with client interests and build from the student progress on topics from the winter quarter (i.e., aquaculture, small scale fisheries, blue food tech and justice and inclusion). A report will be produced and shared with the Indonesian Ministry and our NGO partner. The practicum seeks graduate and well-qualified undergraduate students in such programs as earth systems, computer science, public policy, international policy, business, law, sociology, and marine biology. Policy client: Indonesian Ministry of National Development Planning. Graduate and professional students from law, environmental science and policy, marine sciences, food systems, and public policy are invited to apply. R credit (Section 02) is possible only by consent of the instructor. After the term begins, students accepted into the course can transfer from section (01) into section (02), which meets the R requirement, with consent of the instructor. Elements used in grading: Attendance, Performance, Class Participation, Written Assignments, Final Paper. CONSENT APPLICATION: An application is required for acceptance into the course available at https://forms.gle/WzXQDpt9Wa6hy7j87 Application deadline: March 13, 2024. Cross-listed with Doerr School of Sustainability ( SUSTAIN 121/221).

This policy lab will launch a significant collaboration between the Los Angeles Superior Court -- the largest court in the U.S., serving a population of 10 million -- and a Stanford research team from the Deborah L. Rhode Center on the Legal Profession and the Legal Design Lab. Students will work with senior court leaders and the Stanford team to understand the barriers and challenges court users face in eviction and family law matters (Winter Quarter), and then develop an actionable, evidence-based blueprint for an end-to-end process and digital pathway to promote access to justice that can be piloted and evaluated (Spring Quarter). The American civil justice system is in crisis. In roughly three-quarters of the 15 million civil cases filed in America¿s state courts each year, at least one side lacks a lawyer. Many of these cases involve significant, life-altering matters: debt collection actions, evictions, and family/domestic disputes. Such large, systemic gaps in access to legal services limit who can meaningfully participate in court proceedings, magnifying disparities based on income, education, race, gender, and ethnicity. While the access to justice crisis has many causes, there is mounting evidence that a core part of the problem is the courts themselves. Many courts are difficult to navigate without a lawyer, with inscrutable forms, arcane terminology, and outdated filing systems and requirements. The result is that many people do not engage with the court at all, instead suffering default judgments. And while many courts offer a variety of in-person and digital services to people who need assistance, those services are often hard to access, kludgy, and disconnected. This policy lab will be the first in a series of two, with a second offering in Spring Quarter. During Winter Quarter, students will work with the court to study barriers to litigant access and engagement using mixed-method quantitative and qualitative analysis. Students will analyze existing court data to understand procedural patterns and litigant needs, and they will also help collect new data through surveys, interviews, and focus groups with court users and personnel. This diagnostic work will include opportunities to travel to Los Angeles. Students in the Spring Quarter will use the learnings to design a pilot for a new, end-to-end process that can improve court users¿ participation rates, their engagement, their sense of procedural justice, and their substantive justice outcomes. The practicum will be led by Professor David Freeman Engstrom, Co-Director of the Deborah L. Rhode Center on the Legal Profession and Margaret Hagan, Executive Director of the Stanford Legal Design Lab. We hope to draw students from a variety of disciplines from around the University. Technical or data science expertise is welcome but not required. Students need not take both the Winter and Spring quarter practicums, though they are welcome to do so. Law students wishing to undertake R credit will perform additional research or take on additional tasks analyzing the issues and results of the collective research. R credit (Section 02) is possible only by consent of the instructor. After the term begins, and with the consent of the instructor, students accepted into the course may transfer from section (01) into section (02), which meets the R requirement. Elements used in grading: Attendance, Performance, Class Participation, Written Assignments. Policy Client: Los Angeles Superior Court. CONSENT APPLICATION: To apply for this course, students must submit a Consent Application Form at SLS Registrar https://registrar.law.stanford.edu/. See the Consent Application Form for instructions and the submission deadline.

Law firms' withdrawal from Russia in the wake of the country's brutal invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 surfaced challenging and timely questions around what it means to practice ethically in an increasingly challenging globalized context. This proposed policy lab explores the role of lawyers in times of conflict and crisis. Western legal professionals have garnered criticism, including from Ukrainian civil society, for their alleged role as "enablers" of Russian aggression, especially by helping sanctioned individuals move and hide their wealth. The role of Western lawyers as enablers of corrupt regimes is not new; a 2006 Senate subcommittee report found that "lawyers help establish offshore structures, draft financial instruments, and provide legal opinions justifying offshore transactions." Congress finally responded with the 2022 ENABLERS Act, which would force lawyers to investigate the source of clients' funds when making a transaction, the way banks currently do. The bill failed in the Senate last year however, largely under pressure from the ABA. With sanctions effectiveness being a focus of the Freeman Spogli Institute's McFaul-Yermak International Sanctions Working Group, this SLS policy lab would contribute a unique perspective to a live area policy debate at Stanford and Washington. Students would have the chance to consider the duties of lawyers towards clients credibly linked to ongoing human rights abuses and war crimes, assessing current ABA guidelines, constitutional due process guarantees, recent policy developments like the 2022 ENABLERS Act, and the perspectives of local civil society in Ukraine and other affected areas. Elements used in grading: Attendance, Performance, Class Participation, Written Assignments. Only students who participated in the prior quarter's project will be admitted to the spring quarter practicum. CONSENT APPLICATION: To apply for this course, students must submit a Consent Application Form at SLS Registrar https://registrar.law.stanford.edu/. See the Consent Application Form for instructions and the submission deadline.

Policy Client: Mississippi State Conference NAACP (Charles Taylor and Frank Figgers). As anyone in Jackson, Mississippi will tell you, the city has a terrible relationship with its state government. Chronic mistrust flows in both directions, and for at least the past 25 years, state/local acrimony has been both a cause and symptom of state actions to withdraw authority and funds from Jackson. Current measures to intervene in the governance of Jackson's infrastructure and take over the city's downtown police and courts system mark new escalation in state/city tensions. So far, these deepening tensions have been answered with the typical modes of conflict: adversarial litigation and polarized politics. But those interventions have only power and blame at stake, without fostering cooperative solutions to the city's immense challenges. Jackson has serious, urgent human needs: an old, failing water system that would need heroic reinvestment even without the extreme flood and freeze events now made more common by climate change; a devastating violent crime and homicide rate; a poverty rate above 25% (among the highest rates in the country); a population more than 26% smaller than it was in 1980 (and all the blight associated with such a fall); and more. Challenges that significant (especially in a state facing disinvestment and poverty from border to border) will mean that neither the city nor the state can act effectively alone. But after so many years of antipathy, state and local cooperation will require nothing less than a restorative process. As one small start toward that longer work, this policy lab will work to understand the origins and consequences of Mississippi and Jackson's legal and political relationship. Mediation, after all, requires mutual understanding the setting of baseline facts. Our group will confront the question "how did Jackson and Mississippi reach this crossroads?" from the following angles: (1) Mississippi's constitutional history, (2) the history of other state laws governing municipal power, (3) the history of public corruption cases against both state and local officials, (4) major real estate deals involving state actors within city limits, (5) a recent history of state interventions in valuable local enterprises (including the Jackson Airport and Two Mississippi Museums complex), (5) the recent history of infrastructure and other federal block grant allocation to Jackson, and (6) the history of the battle for voting rights and basic individual civil rights within Jackson. Each student in the lab will take on an independent lane of legal/political research from the list above and write up their findings in sole-authored memos that are organized both topically and chronologically. We will then share and integrate our findings across memos, fusing them in the final two weeks of the lab into a single chronological report documenting the state and local relationship. We will share this final work product with civil rights leaders in Jackson to factcheck and "ground-truth" this research, identifying next steps for sharing, factchecking, and publishing this information with state leaders in future quarters. While this policy lab will be specialized to Jackson's situation, we will take opportunities (at the start of the quarter and at the end) to read and discuss how it relates to broader red state/blue city conflicts in other Southern states. Elements used in grading: Attendance, Performance, Class Participation, Written Assignments. CONSENT APPLICATION: To apply for this course, students must submit a Consent Application Form at SLS Registrar https://registrar.law.stanford.edu/. See the Consent Application Form for instructions and the submission deadline.

Client: Neukom Center for the Rule of Law. It's almost impossible to sue a foreign government in U.S. courts. The Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, the court-created "act of state" doctrine, and other common-law immunities shield foreign officials and governments from most lawsuits. For instance, courts have dismissed claims against China, Cuba, Venezuela, and Russia over allegations of torture, detentions, and election interference. Yet foreign governments have unfettered access to U.S. courts as plaintiffs. And foreign dictatorships--including Russia, China, Turkey, and Venezuela--have leveraged this access to harass political dissidents, critics, and even newspapers in the United States. These doctrines create an asymmetry: foreign dictators and their proxies can access our courts as plaintiffs to harass their opponents, but their regimes are, in turn, immune from lawsuits here. Congress and the U.S. China Commission have asked the Neukom Center for the Rule of Law to propose a bill that would remedy this asymmetry. The policy lab will focus on researching and drafting proposed bill language to present to Congress. The lab will need students who are knowledgeable about statutory interpretation and are ready to research jurisdictional and foreign relations law questions. We plan to enroll no more than four students by consent of the instructor. Elements used in grading: Attendance, performance, class participation, and written assignments. CONSENT APPLICATION: To apply for this course, students must submit a Consent Application Form at SLS Registrar https://registrar.law.stanford.edu/. See the Consent Application Form for instructions and the submission deadline.

Students in this Policy Practicum will advise the Stanford Provost's Office on the legal and policy issues raised by the doxxing of or by members of the Stanford community or otherwise related to activities on campus, and develop recommendations for how the University should respond. Areas of research will cover the legal definition of doxxing, the First Amendment, the Leonard Law and other constraints applying to the University in this context, what training or resources can be offered to people to protect their online privacy, and how to foster open and constructive discourse as an academic institution in light of the way that these online dynamics and the threat of doxxing can chill speech. Note: There is no set meeting time. The instructor and admitted students will work together to set the weekly class meetings (approximately three hours per week) and classroom location. Elements used in grading: Attendance, Performance, Class Participation, Written Assignments. CONSENT APPLICATION: To apply for this course, students must submit a Consent Application Form at SLS Registrar https://registrar.law.stanford.edu/. See the Consent Application Form for instructions and the submission deadline.

An impartial and independent judiciary is crucial for safeguarding democracy and the rule of law. In this policy practicum, students will work on several important projects for submission to the UN Special Rapporteur on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers, Professor Margaret Satterthwaite. The Rapporteur's UN mandate positions her to have a real-time impact on efforts to defend democracy in a time of authoritarian overreach and democratic backsliding. She executes her mandate through individual case work, reports on country visits, amicus briefs, and thematic reports on key issues. Under the supervision of the instructor, and in consultation with the U.N. special rapporteur, students will work in small teams to provide carefully researched, time-relevant inputs on one or more of the following crucial topics: 1. The instrumentalization of the judicial system to harm the rights of government opponents or other dissidents. Students will provide case studies of judicial harassment and other forms of instrumentalization of the judicial system. A specific focus will be placed on the criminalization of lawyers, prosecutors, and judges, and on the use of SLAPP suits (strategic litigation against public participation). Students will perform legal analysis of these concerns using international human rights law and soft law norms such as the Basic Principles on the Role of Lawyers and the Guidelines on the Role of Prosecutors. Questions to be explored include: what is the role of lawyers in guarding against the instrumentalization of the judicial system? What norms provide guidance to lawyers assessing whether zealous advocacy could transform into judicial harassment? What rules can guide prosecutors in charging decisions concerning government opponents? 2. The independence of Indigenous juridical systems. Students will provide case studies exploring how Indigenous peoples have maintained their legal and judicial systems in the United States and countries around the world. The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples guarantees the right of Indigenous peoples "to promote, develop and maintain their institutional structures," including "juridical systems or customs, in accordance with international human rights standards." Questions to be explored include: what challenges have Indigenous peoples faced in maintaining their legal and judicial systems? Are there good practices for safeguarding the self-determination of Indigenous peoples through their juridical systems? 3. Economic and corporate capture of judicial systems. The right to a fair trial requires independent and impartial courts, and international standards make clear that judges must be free from "improper influences [or] inducements" from "any quarter or for any reason." Students will prepare case studies illustrating the risk to judicial systems emanating from powerful economic or corporate interests. Questions to be explored include: what counts as improper economic inducement of a court or its judges and who decides? What rules exist to limit the influence of corporations or other wealthy actors from influencing the selection or appointment of judges? Do ethical codes and laws effectively shield judges from undue influence by powerful economic actors? Are there policies or practices that ensure a country's judiciary is open to jurists of diverse wealth or class backgrounds? Through this practicum, students will learn to work for and engage with a policy client; have an opportunity to have real-time, practical impact on key problems around the world relating to judicial independence; and also hone their legal research, policy analysis, and writing skills. Elements used in grading: Attendance, Performance, Class Participation, Written Assignments. CONSENT APPLICATION: To apply for this course, students must submit a Consent Application Form at SLS Registrar https://registrar.law.stanford.edu/. See the Consent Application Form for instructions and the submission deadline.

Nature-based climate solutions can enhance the natural proclivity of landscapes and seascapes to combat climate change by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere while generating co-benefits such as biodiversity, cleaner air and water, and improved resilience in the face of destructive climate impacts. Yet "nature-based climate solutions" (NbS) are not well-defined and a general lack of understanding, experience and information-sharing about NbS is holding back their adoption. In addition, U.S. laws and policies can limit the deployment of NbS. In this policy lab we will work with a non-profit client that invests in a large number of NbS and is interested in identifying and overcoming barriers that are constraining their investments, and in improving how they measure, monitor and verify the climate and other benefits associated with NbS projects. Consent Application: Students interested in enrolling in this policy lab should complete a consent application that includes these elements: Briefly describe why you are interested in this policy lab; Please describe your prior relevant courses and work experience; Are you willing to attend a Saturday morning session at the law school on Elements of Policy Analysis? Policy Lab Consent Applications are available at SLS Registrar https://registrar.law.stanford.edu/. Applications for this course will be available by February 28. Elements used in grading: TBA. Cross-listed with the Doerr School of Sustainability ( SUSTAIN 212). Students admitted to SUSTAIN 212/ LAW 809R will automatically receive a permission code to enroll LAW 809R in Axess. Admitted students wishing to enroll in SUSTAIN 212 should contact the instructor for a permission code to enroll in that course number.