The School of Law's Elder Law Clinic is an integral part of the University's commitment to service learning. Addressing the legal needs of the Queens senior-citizen community, it affords students an opportunity to develop lawyering skills, practical legal knowledge, and professional responsibility while serving the community. Students develop not only an understanding of substantive law, but also an understanding of what it means to have a client and to effectively advocate for a client.
Students represent actual clients under the supervision of a faculty member.
In doing so, students practice situational decision-making that exercises their legal knowledge, common sense, and ethical values. The Elder Law Clinic also includes a seminar component in which expert attorneys, judges, and St. John's professors teach lawyering skills and law concepts, and impart practical advice on developing cases and presenting them to a court. The students participate in similar exercises throughout the class year. The majority of cases handled by the Clinic involve consumer fraud, such as unfair repair contracts. St. John's law students have been successful in rescinding or otherwise neutralizing a number of such agreements on behalf of their senior-citizen clients.