Last semester, one Cornell University Law School student helped a mentally impaired local man recover funds that had been mismanaged by a financial adviser. In another case litigated over several years, various students helped win reinstatement and back pay for a Native American prison guard who was suspended for refusing, for religious reasons, to cut his hair. Other students worked on cases ranging from helping women on welfare obtain child- support payments to assisting attorneys file appeals for indigent death-row inmates.

These are just a few examples of how 120 Cornell law students each year donate between five and 25 hours a week as part of their clinical course work. Every year they help about 140 local people and scores of others outside Tompkins County resolve their legal problems.

"Our seven clinics not only give law students hands-on experience in litigation planning, interviewing, counseling, legal drafting, negotiating, discovery, and trial and appellate advocacy but, at the same time, provide hundreds of hours of free but high-quality legal services each year to low-income community members," says Glenn Galbreath, the Cornell Legal Aid Clinic director. Although many of the cases are eligible "assigned counsel" cases, which would entitle the clinics to charge Tompkins County for the work, the clinics have chosen, as a service to the community, not to bill the county.

Students handle a wide variety of cases under the umbrella of the Legal Aid Clinic, which includes the Women and the Law Clinic and the Government Benefits Clinic. These range from cases involving unemployment, social security, welfare, food stamps and housing, to family and consumer law and, occasionally, even criminal law. In addition, students work on cases in

Cornell's Religious Liberty Clinic (the only such law-school clinic in the country) and the Death Penalty Clinic.

Slated to open in the fall of 1999 is yet another clinic: the Small Children/Small Business Clinic, in which students from the Law School, College of Human Ecology and the Johnson Graduate School of Management will form small interdisciplinary teams to help child-care providers in Tompkins County with their entrepreneurial and legal needs, including incorporation, marketing, business planning, liability and space planning, zoning, contracts, building and fire codes, and negotiations.

Students in all the clinics are taking related courses, concurrently, at the Law School. Admitted to the New York Bar as law interns, the students function under the direct supervision of faculty members, who are licensed attorneys in New York state.

"While students have the opportunity to perform every attorney task in their cases, they do not give legal advice, appear in court or make any significant legal decision of any kind without the supervision of a licensed attorney on the faculty," says Galbreath.

In the Death Penalty Clinic, students help defense attorneys with appeals by indigent death-row inmates in some of the 38 states that have the death penalty. "Some of the two dozen students who worked on capital punishment cases last year interviewed law enforcement authorities, witnesses, former jurors and, in one case, a convicted killer, in the process of trying to discover some state misconduct that might lead to overturning a defendant's conviction," says John Blume, one of the founders of the clinic and a visiting Cornell law professor and South Carolina attorney, who specializes in capital punishment cases.

Students from the law school not only get "live-client" experience through the clinics but also through several externships: Working for judges on local, state or federal courts; for the Tompkins County Office of Chemung County Neighborhood Legal Services, where students work at the local office for civil legal services; for the Tompkins County Law Guardian's Office, representing children in Family Court; and for state legislators.

"These opportunities assist students in bridging the gap between the study and the practice of law," adds Galbreath. "They not only provide an opportunity for the student to develop skills and practice roles immediately transferable to the actual practice of law, but also offer a context in which the student is better able to assimilate lessons from more traditional courses. Just as important, however, is the benefit these services provide to the community."

Potential clients for Cornell Legal Aid can call 255-4196 in early September for an appointment. Clients must have cases in Tompkins County. There are income restrictions.