The University of Tulsa College of Law

Full-time and reduced-schedule options; summer, fall, or spring entering classes; and broad curricular offerings in fall, spring, and summer are available. Beyond our required curriculum, students may pursue interests across a broad array of subject areas, or focus on a specific area of concentration, including Sustainable Energy and Natural Resources Law, Native American Law, Immigration Law, and Health Law.

Students at TU Law have a great variety of career choices available to them that are enhanced by the opportunity for interdisciplinary study. Students may pursue a JD concurrently with graduate degrees in other disciplines, including business, psychology, and cyber security.

In the Buck Colbert Franklin Legal Clinic, students will provide legal services to the North Tulsa and Greenwood communities. Students will engage in both individual and systemic advocacy to advance community development and social justice by representing individual and small business clients in civil legal matters, both transactional and litigation-based.

Students may, for example, represent an entrepreneur forming a new small business or a small business struggling financially pre and in bankruptcy. Students may also represent individuals in post-conviction matters, such as expungements and pardons, as well as in deprived proceedings, landlord-tenant matters and foreclosure defense.

Buck Colbert Franklin Legal Clinic students will take the lead on cases in teams of two. During this clinic, they will develop lawyering skills, such as interviewing, strategizing, negotiating and client-centered representation. In doing so, they will also have the opportunity to understand the role of nonlegal issues, such as trauma, on their legal cases.

An important part of the clinic experience will also be a continual critical examination of the systems in which lawyers work and the impact those systems have on marginalized populations.

In fall 2021 — the Buck Colbert Franklin Legal Clinic’s launch semester — students may continue working with community residents, leaders, business people, activists and service providers to assess the communities’ legal needs and to organize mobile clinics to address immediate legal needs on a larger scale.

The Public Defender Clinic (PDC) is a public service, criminal defense-adjacent program for law students launching in fall 2020. The PDC has two goals:

(1) To allow law students to get one-on-one advocacy experience while helping presently incarcerated individuals apply for sentence commutation, ultimately advocating for them at the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board: and (2) to reduce Oklahoma’s incarceration rate directly and by supporting legislation, with an emphasis on Oklahoma’s female incarceration crisis.

The Terry West Civil Legal Clinic is supported by the Sarkeys Foundation. It addresses access to justice for marginalized communities in Tulsa, with a particular focus on the intersection of legal needs within these communities. While serving individual clients, students also engage more broadly with the justice system and structural access to justice barriers. The clinic explores different mechanisms of advocacy, including court observations, fact-finding and reporting, impact litigation, and legislative advocacy. Students may also create know your rights materials and presentations.

The seminar and clinic work teach lawyering skills and explore the ethical, practical, theoretical, and strategic issues around legal advocacy and the lived experiences of individuals from marginalized communities. Students gain lawyering skills, including interviewing and counseling clients, fostering a lawyer-client relationship that empowers the client, developing factual and legal arguments, drafting legal briefs, and oral argument and advocacy. They also explore issues of professional responsibility, the role of the justice system in the lives of marginalized communities, their role as lawyers within this system, and ways to advocate both inside and outside of the courtroom.