Clinical Education Program

Asylum Clinic

The Asylum Clinic is intended to provide gifted second and third year law students, acting under professorial supervision, to represent indigent and underprivileged foreign-born individuals who seek asylum in the United States based on a well-founded fear of persecution (including arbitrary detention, physical and psychological abuse, and torture) because of race, religion, nationality (ethnicity), membership in a particular social group (e.g., trade unionists, abused women, the disabled), or political opinion.

The students selected for the clinic are required to also take an additional lecture course in the substance and procedures of Asylum and Refugee Law. Under the guidance of Judge Einhorn (the author of the U.S. law on asylum) and two junior instructors (who are also immigration law practitioners), clinical students participate in the screening of asylum seekers, the preparing of their relief applications and supporting documents and declarations (from therapists, political scientists, supporting fact witnesses ), and the presenting of their cases to the Asylum Office of the Department of Homeland Security, in U.S. Immigration Court, and on appeal.

The Asylum Clinic is open to all indigent and underprivileged asylum seekers who upon screening by Judge Einhorn, the instructors, and the students, are deemed to possess credible fears of persecution. However, the clinic is especially concerned with representing victims of religious persecution, such as Jews and Christians in radical Islamic theocratic regimes like Iran, and intolerant and authoritarian or unstable regimes like China and Pakistan.

The freedom to worship without government intimidation is the very first right guaranteed in the very First Amendment to our Federal Constitution. Under the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998[1][1], the United States is now required to emphasize the protection and advancement of the freedom of worship as an element of U.S. foreign and immigration policy. It is the raison d'etre of Pepperdine's Asylum Clinic to ensure that this legal principle is extended to those whose principled professions of faith in the face of persecution do not match their financial resources for representation in immigration proceedings.

For more information, please contact Judge Einhorn, director of the Asylum Clinic, at (310) 506-4416 or clinicallaw@peppperdine.edu. Related Link: Judge Einhorn Inaugurates the Pepperdine Asylum Clinic: http://law.pepperdine.edu/news-events/news/2008/07/einhorn.htm