Photo: Washington University in St. Louis.
The Washington University in St. Louis School of Law has received a $3 million grant from the Stanton Foundation to establish an endowment for its First Amendment Clinic, along with a challenge gift of up to $2 million to spur further giving. Announced on 29 June 2026, the endowment secures, in perpetuity, a clinic that has spent the better part of a decade defending free speech in real courts. Our congratulations to the school and the clinic.
What the clinic does
Founded in 2019 and directed since then by Professor Lisa Hoppenjans, the First Amendment Clinic gives students hands-on litigation experience while providing free legal help on free speech, free press, assembly, and petition matters. Students draft filings, take depositions, and help prepare oral arguments in live cases. One of the clinic's notable wins came in 2024, when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit affirmed, in Felts v. Reed, that a St. Louis official had violated the First Amendment by blocking a constituent on his official social media account, a case the clinic handled with the ACLU of Missouri.
"The First Amendment protects freedoms that are foundational to a democratic society, and this clinic gives our students the opportunity to defend those principles in real-world settings," said Stefanie Lindquist, the Nickerson Dean at WashU Law. Hoppenjans framed it as a mutual benefit: "Individuals are able to receive free assistance with their cases, while our students gain invaluable litigation experience that shapes the rest of their careers. This support from the Stanton Foundation ensures that our students can continue to have these experiences for many years to come."
The gift, and the donor
The Stanton Foundation is named for Frank Stanton, the longtime president of CBS and a fierce advocate for the First Amendment, and it has seeded First Amendment clinics at a number of law schools in his honor. Its support for WashU's clinic now exceeds five million dollars over nearly a decade. An endowment matters in a specific way: it turns a program that depends on annual fundraising into a permanent fixture, one that can keep taking cases, and training students, indefinitely.
For WashU law students
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Sources
This report is based on the announcement published by Washington University in St. Louis. Quotations are drawn from that announcement.
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