Once a week, as a student in what is arguably the oldest ongoing clinical course at Harvard Law School, Isabelle Pride ’25 leaves her Cambridge apartment and takes the subway to Suffolk County Superior Court in downtown Boston.
Pride, a budding litigator, spends the day observing trials and motions practice and assisting Judge Michael P. Doolin, an associate Superior Court justice, with research and writing for his judicial opinions. “I wanted to be in the courtroom seeing in real life what we read about in our cases,” said Pride. “I wanted to understand what’s going on from the judge’s side.”
Like many hundreds of students before her, Pride is enrolled in the law school’s Judicial Process in Trial Courts Clinic, which for five decades has placed students in clerkship-like internships with state and federal judges throughout the Boston area. John C. Cratsley, a longtime Massachusetts state court judge, created the course in 1975 and has taught it ever since, making him the law school’s longest-serving clinical instructor.
“My fundamental belief, or motivation, in creating and continuing the Judicial Process Clinic for so many years is that Harvard Law students should experience firsthand how the third and most independent branch of government, the judiciary, functions,” said Cratsley, who retired from the bench 10 years ago — reluctantly, he says — at the mandatory retirement age of 70. “Most importantly, they should experience this by working as interns with trial judges where all the disputes, large and small, begin.”
This year, as Harvard Law School commemorates the 50th anniversary of the law school’s Clinical Program, Cratsley’s influence on clinical education and generations of students is also being recognized.
“Harvard Law students should experience firsthand how the third and most independent branch of government, the judiciary, functions.”
John C. Cratsley
“Fifty years is an incredible milestone, and it still doesn’t begin to quantify the impact that Judge Cratsley has had on the clinical program,” said Meredith Boak ’12, assistant dean of clinical and experiential education and pro bono programs. “He was one of the early pioneers to help develop clinical education at Harvard Law School, and his legacy can be seen both in the longstanding demand for the Judicial Process in Trial Courts Clinic and in the nameless support he provides to many of our other clinics.”
Cratsley “is a gentleman scholar, part of a great tradition of the bench and bar in giving back to the profession,” said Jeff Senger ’88, for 17 years a leading litigator at the U.S. Justice Department and former acting chief counsel of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Senger said he enrolled in Cratsley’s course in 1987 “because it was exceptionally highly rated by prior students,” and he found it “one of the best courses at HLS” because it focused “on local courts, where much of justice in America occurs.”
“As both a judge and a professor,” said Senger, Cratsley “has a rare ability to run a courtroom and classroom effectively while also giving gentle guidance to the participants that helps them become better lawyers.”
“I believe I started a clinic and class 50 years ago that is truly a ‘win-win,’” said Cratsley. “Law students have the opportunity to intern inside judicial chambers with a busy trial judge, and the judge receives assistance with needed legal research and writing.”
Two years ago, due to high student demand, the course — which includes a weekly seminar component — was expanded from one semester a year to two, with 20 students enrolled each term. Many students choose to continue their internships for a second semester, and upwards of 1,000 students have taken the course since it launched.
Cratsley was a graduate of the University of Chicago Law School with an LL.M. in trial advocacy from Georgetown Law School when he arrived at Harvard Law School in 1968 as a Reginald Heber Smith Community Lawyer Fellow at the Community Legal Assistance Office.
Launched in 1966 with a grant from the federal Office of Economic Opportunity, the project was a neighborhood law office for low-income clients. In an early form of clinical education, in the 1970-71 academic year Cratsley and another project lawyer, Van Lanckton ’67, designed and taught a course they called Supervised Clinical Instruction for Harvard Law student attorneys in the Community Legal Assistance Office. (Jeanne Charn ’70 views that project as a precursor to the WilmerHale Legal Services Center in Jamaica Plain, which she launched with Professor Gary Bellow ’60 in 1979.)
In 1972, Cratsley was appointed as a judge with the Roxbury District Court in Boston. A couple of years later, he came up with the idea for a course that would offer Harvard Law students internships with judges in community courts. He pitched it to then-Dean Albert M. Sacks ’48, who gave his blessing, and the course, which he named Judicial Process in Community Courts, debuted in 1975, Cratsley recalled.
“As a young judge in Roxbury court, I saw the real utility of bringing law students into court through internships with judges,” he said. “It’s exactly the model I still run today,” although placements have expanded to federal courts and a variety of state courts, including the Juvenile Court, Housing Court, Land Court and Superior Court departments. Cratsley himself became a Superior Court judge in 1983, and about a decade ago the course was renamed Judicial Process in Trial Courts to reflect the breadth of internship opportunities.
“As part of the clinic, students get a front-row seat participating in the judicial process to better contextualize the cases they are reading in their traditional coursework and to frame their own future practice,” said Boak.
Students commit to spending at least eight hours a week in court, for which they receive clinical credits. Especially valuable is the mentorship from their judges, they say.
Like Pride, Nina Zhao ’25 plans to be a litigator. She enrolled in the course because she yearned for more real-life courtroom experiences. Zhao is interning with Judge David A. Deakin ’91, an associate justice in the Suffolk County Superior Court, and she says he discusses with her the styles and effectiveness of opening statements and closing arguments witnessed at trial. “I have learned tremendously from those conversations,” Zhao said.
For Pride, understanding court proceedings from a judicial perspective has been extraordinarily helpful. “Judge Doolin is incredibly thoughtful about making sure to take time to talk to me and the other intern about everything we witness in court: the way he made decisions, what a particular motion was about, what he thought about the motion, why the advocates made one argument or another.”
For his part, Doolin said, “I think it’s part of our responsibility to teach young lawyers about different parts of the Massachusetts court system and the courts, which do so much good work.” Cratsley said that judges, whose caseloads are typically very high, appreciate the extra help they get with legal research and draft memoranda. Many judges have participated over the years, and Cratsley has no problem recruiting; three new judges are participating this year.
Pride and Zhao also praise the classroom component, which covers such topics as judicial ethics, restorative justice, and plea bargaining. Four years ago, Barbara Berenson ’84, a former senior attorney at the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court and an expert on judicial ethics, joined Cratsley as co-teacher. “Students are very concerned about the fairness of the system when it may be filled with people entering the system with their own biases,” said Cratsley. “They ask very, very demanding questions.”
There have been many memorable experiences in the course over the past 50 years, Cratsley said, including two students, William Locke ’23 and Emily Shah ’24, who recently had their final papers published in the Massachusetts Law Review. Locke wrote about the danger of peremptory challenges in jury trials, and Shah wrote about jury improvements in how Massachusetts selects and notifies potential jurors of their obligation to appear in court.
Another recent student, Andrew Spore ’15, wrote his final paper on creating a right to counsel in eviction cases, which, unlike in criminal cases, was not constitutionally required. “As part of his paper, he drafted a model statute that would provide for state-funded counsel — like public defenders — for low-income defendants in eviction cases,” Cratsley said. “Soon thereafter, a Massachusetts state legislator filed a bill containing basically the same language” and last year similar legislation was passed and signed into law by Gov. Maura Healy.
“Every Wednesday, I put on my suit and go into court and I’m among the lawyers and judges and clerks,” said Pride, who after graduation will join a New York City firm. “I can’t think of a better class to be taking my 3L year as I transition to my professional life.”
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