Enrolling in a clinical course wasn't an option when Joel Bernstein was a student at Brooklyn Law School in the early 1970s — lectures and seminars dominated the curriculum. Four decades later, his alma mater offers 19 clinics within the law school and in outside agencies — one of which is the Securities Arbitration Clinic that Bernstein oversees with a fellow partner in Labaton Sucharow.

“When you think about medical school, those students are seeing patients and cutting up cadavers,” he said. “They're doing all sorts of stuff from almost the first week of the program. In our profession, until clinics started to become a big part of the educational process, people were just thrown in.” Today new lawyers handle complex matters the day they are sworn into the bar, Bernstein (left) said, yet he spent his first years on the job teaching himself to practice.

In this special report, we highlight clinics that stand out either for their unique focus or their long record of success. Students at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, represent emerging fashion designers in the county's only fashion law clinic. The University of Virginia School of Law's Supreme Court Clinic has brought at least one case before the high court every term since 2006. Police accountability is a hot topic, but students in the University of Chicago Law School's Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project have represented victims of police abuse since 2000.