Cardozo School of Law is pleased to announce that its Indie Film Clinic, directed by Professor Michelle Greenberg-Kobrin, is the recipient of a grant from The Legal Clinic Fund. The Legal Clinic Fund is a collaborative fund to support the growth and sustainability of legal clinics across the United States that seek to advance and defend First Amendment rights, media freedom, and transparency in their communities and nationally.
Professor Michelle Greenberg-Kobrin said, "As the past year has shown us the work of videojournalists is more increasingly important in advancing the cause of justice. The work of the Indie Film Clinic has helped empower and elevate the voices of visual advocates as they seek to tell untold stories. This grant will enable us to broaden our work and serve the increasing number of clients who need our services."
The Indie Film Clinic is a not-for-profit clinical program that provides free legal services to filmmakers and videojournalists producing independent, documentary and narrative films and to organizations that support those films.
The clinic's mission is to provide the next generation of Cardozo lawyers with a solid grounding in transactional legal skills and to strengthen New York City as a center of independent film production.
The grant funds will allow the clinic to hire a clinical fellow to expand the number of students it can train and clients it can represent, with a particular focus on those from historically underserved communities. It will also expand community training sessions, provide additional programming for documentarians and video journalists, and increase its pop-up clinics which offer legal services to broad communities of filmmakers.
The fund was started in 2019 to support the small network of legal clinics at universities as they work to advance and defend First Amendment rights, media freedom, and transparency in their communities and nationally. The Fund envisions these local legal clinics as a critical backbone of new legal support that can aid local journalists and media makers as they investigate injustice, hold power to account, and tell the stories we need to hear.
The Indie Film Clinic is a robust part of Cardozo’s Intellectual Property program, alongside the FAME Center, the Tech Startup Clinic, the Cardozo Data Law Initiative, The Blockchain Project and the Cardozo-Google Patent Project for Patent Diversity.
The Legal Clinic Fund is generously supported by The Abrams Foundation, Democracy Fund, Heising-Simons Foundation, and The Klarman Family Foundation.