Written by: Suzi Morales

The University of Iowa College of Law clinical program was Kate Melloy Goettel’s (07JD) first introduction to immigration law. She went on to work in the field for more than 17 years at both the Department of Justice and in the nonprofit legal world. The clinic “really set me on the trajectory I went on in terms of my career,” she recalled.

As she worked in the clinic under the guidance of now-retired Professor Barbara Schwartz, Goettel remembers thinking something else: “Being a clinical law professor would be a cool job.”

Turns out she was right.

In the fall of 2024, Goettel returned to Iowa Law, this time as a clinical associate professor. In January 2025, the Federal Impact Litigation Clinic met for the first time, under her leadership.

Goettel represents a new generation of professors taking the Iowa Law clinical program into the future. The program is creating new specialties and hiring new clinicians, but its DNA remains the same: giving students a chance to practice creative, high-impact lawyering in a supportive environment.

When the Iowa Law clinical law program was founded in 1971, clinical legal education in the U.S. as students know it today was in its early stages. Iowa Law’s program started with two clinicians. By the time Emeritus Clinical Professor John Allen joined the clinical faculty in 1990, the school’s clinical program was “clicking along pretty impressively” with six faculty, he said.

From those early days, the program was agile and collaborative. Allen frequently worked with other clinical professors, and students would often handle multiple types of cases. As the legal profession has become more specialized, Iowa Law’s clinical program has also given students opportunities to pursue different specialties, but the cooperative spirit remains.

Room for collaboration

Like Goettel, Associate Clinical Professor Megan Graham said her law school clinical experience was “transformational.” Graham went to law school because of her interest in national security issues. She was a student at New York University School of Law when former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden leaked classified National Security Agency documents in 2013. She recalls how that event thrust the issues that had drawn her to law school into the national spotlight.

Graham came to Iowa Law in January 2024 to establish the Technology Law Clinic. Graham’s Technology Law Clinic and Goettel’s Federal Impact Litigation Clinic are new to the Iowa Law clinical program, but they both build on existing clinical work.

For decades, Iowa Law clinics operated more like departments in a single law firm than a number of separate boutiques. Today, the clinical program includes five distinct specialties. Along with the Technology Law Clinic and the Federal Impact Litigation Clinic, students can work in the Community Law Empowerment Project, which works with nonprofits to strengthen communities, and the Federal Criminal Defense Clinic and Immigration Advocacy Clinic, which partner with organizations to solve systemic problems that can’t be addressed through traditional legal methods.

Even when students are not working together directly, there is plenty of (literal) space for collaboration. Housed on the third floor of the Boyd Law Building, the clinic office is arranged with student cubicles grouped in the center of an outer ring of faculty offices. While there are private meeting spaces and other measures to protect confidentiality, students and professors from different clinics frequently interact with each other.

Graham said, “I can walk into any clinician’s office and say, ‘This is something I’ve been seeing in my work. Are you seeing it in yours?’” Because Graham’s technology law practice touches on so many legal disciplines, she values the availability of colleagues as collaborators and sounding boards on everything from criminal law to immigration.

Graham calls herself “agnostic as to the lawyering approach we use.” That means that she and her students tailor their advocacy to what is best suited to their clients’ needs, whether it is litigation, legislative, or policy change, or preparing in-depth research reports. She says there is no such thing as a “typical” matter for the clinic.

“That broader perspective, that availability of more options, will train our students to be better advocates.”
—Megan Graham

Goettel’s Federal Impact Litigation Clinic focuses on immigration issues and complements the Immigration Advocacy Clinic that Goettel herself participated in as a student. She anticipates that her clinic’s docket will include habeas corpus challenges to the detention of individuals in immigration custody, Freedom of Information Act requests, and impact lawsuits on behalf of individuals and groups of immigrants.

“We will be examining issues of the laws around who gets to come into the country and who gets to stay in the country, particularly asylum seekers and refugees. And we will be critically examining the whole ecosystem of how immigration agencies work at the federal level,” said Goettel.

Toward the future

As she was interviewing for the position of creating and directing what’s become the Technology Law Clinic, Graham said, “one of the things that was really attractive about Iowa was the opportunity to start a new practice area alongside thoughtful and energetic colleagues in a clinical program with a lot of history.”

Goettel admits that the first few days she walked into the law school as faculty, now occupying an office just down the hall from her former professors, were “a little weird.” Since then, she has grown accustomed to working with her mentors. Working with them has given her a new appreciation of the degree of thought and attention that goes into creating a purposeful clinic experience, she said.

“I am really just standing on the shoulders of people like Professor Schwartz, Professor Allen, Professor [Len] Sandler, and others who started these programs and really built up the clinic,” Goettel said. “It’s exciting to build something new in a place that has really deep roots.”

Even as the clinical program evolves, Allen noted, “Our approach to how we think about and study law is changed by the experience of representing people.”

Graham shares a similar outlook to Allen’s on the student experience.

“Students will have opportunities to see more ways of being a lawyer, more issue areas that they can practice in,” she said. “And that broader perspective, that availability of more options, will train our students to be better advocates. It also means that, hopefully, more of our students can really work on becoming the kind of lawyers that they want to be.”

Q&A with Kate Melloy Goettel (07JD)

Inspiring the next generation of federal litigators

What was a pivotal moment in your legal career?
I am fortunate to have worked on both sides of the immigration issue, first defending immigration agencies at the Department of Justice and then representing immigrants in federal litigation. With this in mind, a pivotal moment is this moment—starting a new Federal Impact Litigation Clinic at Iowa Law. It allows me to pull from my experiences to teach students to be impactful federal litigators, regardless of the path they choose.

Why is clinical education so vital?
Clinic supplements the doctrinal courses with real-world experience. Clinic gives students a chance to learn by doing before they complete their legal education and become practicing lawyers. While the stakes are high in clinic—we represent real people with real legal problems—clinic provides students a place to learn, grow, and make mistakes with the safety net of faculty guidance.

What inspires you?
My students! They are smart, interesting, eager to learn, and they teach me all the pop culture I don’t know. A runner-up for inspiration: the bald eagles that fly outside my office window over the Iowa River.

Why is Iowa Law such a good fit for you?
Iowa is home for me. I grew up in Cedar Rapids and am passionate about the quality of public education here. I have taken full advantage of Iowa’s excellent public school system, having attended a public high school in Cedar Rapids (go Warriors), the University of Northern Iowa for undergrad (go Panthers), and Iowa Law (go Hawks). It is meaningful to me to give back to the state school system that has given me so much.

What are your goals for the Federal Impact Litigation Clinic?
To train a new generation of litigators in public interest litigation. I hope students will walk out of my clinic as better litigators and more thoughtful and well-rounded lawyers.

Q&A with Megan Graham

Giving students real-world experience in technology and the law

What was a pivotal moment in your legal career?
Participating in two clinics in law school. As a student, I had a clinical experience at the Brennan Center for Justice and I joined NYU’s Technology Law & Policy Clinic. I had a vague sense of what types of law I found interesting (national security and surveillance), but I didn’t know anyone who practiced in those areas. Clinic opened my eyes to the myriad possible ways to be a public interest lawyer practicing in these spaces.

Why is clinical education so vital?
It is a chance in law school to start practicing law, but to do so with close supervision from an attorney and with built-in moments for reflecting on what lessons you’re learning that you can carry with you into practice. Clinics are designed to help students assist clients, learn what it means to be zealous advocates in practice, and develop skills with a strong safety net behind them that they may not have after graduating.

What inspires you?
Our students’ enthusiasm and dedication to their clients. They are ready to take on the hard work of advocating for their clients’ goals and often do so with a sense of curiosity and creativity that is very energizing.

Why is Iowa Law such a good fit for you?
It is a great fit for my work because surveillance questions and challenges don’t exist just on the coasts, despite that being where many of these policy questions are raised. There are many organizations in the Midwest that deal with surveillance issues every day, and having the Technology Law Clinic at Iowa can bring the work closer to home.

What are your goals for the Technology Law Clinic?
To provide opportunities for Iowa Law students to learn how to be the sort of lawyers they want to be, while also serving our clients well. I hope that the clinic can be a home for students who are interested in exploring what it means to confront cutting-edge questions about technology and the law, or who just want to work on building lawyering skills they can bring with them into practice.

An up-and-coming human rights clinic at Iowa 

Clinical Associate Professor Hope Metcalf is leading Iowa Law’s newest venture: the Human Rights Initiative (HRI) Clinic. Metcalf joined the College of Law faculty in January 2025 after more than 15 years at Yale Law School and has extensive experience in directing a human rights clinic. 

Following a pilot in spring 2025, she launched a fully operating nonpartisan clinic in the fall at Iowa Law that provides students the opportunity to collaborate with human rights organizations within the U.S. and internationally. The 12 students currently enrolled operate in four teams of three, working on causes that protect and uphold what Metcalf refers to as “the basic guardrails for democracy,” including the freedoms of speech and association, in addition to environmental work. 

"Even if none of my students are going to go on to become full-time human rights lawyers working in India or in South Africa, they nonetheless are making connections between what they see lawyers in those countries doing and how it might inform the way that they think about basic protections for democracy here at home,” Metcalf said. 

In supporting partner organizations, which are mostly made up of overworked attorneys working in under-resourced parts of the world, clinic students are gaining valuable cross-functional skills and delivering real value to their partner colleagues. 

“Watching our students make that transition from student to professional is very exciting in that context. And I think that they enjoy and take a lot of inspiration from our partners, many of whom themselves are individuals who have escaped persecution for their defense of human rights. They are working directly for people who walk the walk,” Metcalf added.