Lewis & Clark College Student Defense Lawyer
Lewis & Clark is three schools on adjacent campuses, and which one you attend changes almost everything about your case. An undergraduate in the College of Arts & Sciences, a candidate in the Graduate School of Education & Counseling, and a law student at Lewis & Clark Law School face different documents, different decision-makers, and different consequences for the same underlying conduct. The students who call me have usually just learned that the policy they read online belonged to a different one of the three.
Overview
Lewis & Clark is a private college in Portland, founded in 1867. Because it is not a state actor, the Fourteenth Amendment framework that governs Oregon’s public universities does not apply the same way. The theory that does the work is contractual: the student handbook, the graduate program materials, the law school’s academic standards, and the catalog are the promises the institution made about how it would treat you, and the case is usually about whether it kept them. That is the subject of my breach of contract against universities page.
Federal law still reaches a private campus. Title IX governs sexual misconduct proceedings at any institution receiving federal funds, Section 504 and the ADA govern accommodations, and FERPA governs the record and who may see it.
Where Lewis & Clark cases come from
Undergraduate matters look like they do at any residential liberal arts college: housing and organization discipline, allegations between students, and academic integrity referrals in which the first evidence was a similarity score or an AI-detection report rather than a witness.
The Graduate School of Education & Counseling adds a layer that catches people off guard. Counseling and teacher preparation programs evaluate students on professional dispositions and field placement performance, not only coursework, and a supervisor’s concern in a practicum or internship can end a program without any disciplinary charge. Those matters run through my professionalism and fitness concerns and clinical placement pages, and licensure exposure makes the wording of any resolution matter as much as the outcome.
The law school — formally the Northwestern School of Law of Lewis & Clark College, ABA-approved since 1970 and known for its environmental, natural resources, energy, and animal law programs — runs its own academic standards and honor provisions. Anything recorded there as misconduct or professionalism follows the graduate into bar character and fitness review, the subject of my law school dismissal and academic standing page.
Which process you are in matters
The track sets the deadline, the decision-maker, and the review available. A conduct charge is disciplinary and runs under the applicable handbook. A Title IX or sexual misconduct allegation has its own procedure. An academic dismissal or standing decision is appealed academically. A dispositions or fitness concern in a graduate program may travel through a committee that exists nowhere else in the institution. Confirm which document and which body govern your matter before you respond.
What to do first
Obtain the governing policy for your school within Lewis & Clark — undergraduate handbook, graduate program manual, or law school academic standards — from the institution’s own site rather than relying on any summary, including this one, and confirm the edition that applies to your matter. Read the syllabus or placement agreement alongside it. Then calendar every deadline in writing, request your file, and preserve drafts, evaluations, supervisor communications, and messages before they are gone. Do not give a statement or attend an interview until you understand what the institution claims to have.
What I can help with
- Reading the governing policy against the charge or decision letter
- Helping you prepare your account, your documents, and your questions
- Testing whether the school followed its own published procedures
- Scrutinizing software-based evidence, including AI-detection and similarity reports
- Assisting with the written response and appeal, to the extent the policy permits
- Serving as your advisor where the process allows it
- Negotiating sanction terms, notations, and disclosure language
What a lawyer may actually do in your case depends on that school’s policy — and here that means the policy of your school within Lewis & Clark, which may differ from the one next door. Some processes allow counsel to participate, some allow a non-participating advisor, and some allow no outside person at all. Reading the current policy is the first step, and it determines what form the assistance takes.
Common questions
I found a policy on the college website. Is it the one that applies to me?
Check which of the three schools published it. Undergraduate, graduate education and counseling, and law each maintain their own documents, and preparing against the wrong one costs you the only response window you get.
My field placement supervisor raised a concern. Is that a disciplinary matter?
Usually not in form, and often more serious in effect. Dispositions and placement evaluations are treated as academic judgments, which draws deference, so the response has to be built from the placement agreement, the written evaluations, and the program’s own remediation procedures rather than from an argument about fairness in the abstract.
I am a law student. How much does the wording of a resolution matter?
Enormously. Character and fitness questionnaires ask about findings, and you will be explaining the language of your resolution to a bar examiner years after everyone at the school has forgotten the incident. Negotiate the record, not just the sanction.
Other Oregon schools I cover include Reed College, the University of Portland, and Willamette University. The full list is on the Oregon student defense page.
This is general information about the matters I handle and the law that applies to them. It is not legal advice about your situation, and the law in this area can change. For advice on your matter, start with the Full Read + Game Plan — your entire file read, straight answers, and exactly what to do next, in what order.
This page is informational and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the institution named on it.
Attorney advertising. Zachary Gaynor is admitted in Florida and its federal courts, not in Oregon; Oregon matters are handled through the framework described on the nationwide practice page — federal-law assessment, campus-process support where the school’s policy permits an advisor, and association with local counsel or pro hac vice admission where required.