This year, across the nation, state legislators and powerful corporate interests with financial ties to universities and influence over them have launched an unprecedented number of attacks on law school clinics. As universities increasingly seek to educate students through service-learning courses, law school clinics may be the bellwether for determining whether the faculty's academic freedom in teaching will transcend the traditional classroom or be left at the classroom door. Recent legislative and corporate efforts to interfere in the operations of law clinics indicate that academic freedom is at risk when hands-on student learning bumps up against "real-world" disputes. To understand why attacks on law school clinics are a harbinger of threats to academic freedom when teaching moves outside the classroom, the authors discuss the role of clinical legal education in American law schools and as part of the service-learning movement in higher education. They present a brief history of attacks on law school clinics in order to illustrate the underlying motivations and strategies of those interfering with academic freedom when learning takes place in the real world. The history of attacks on clinical programs and interference with other educational activities outside of the classroom demonstrates that academic freedom is increasingly at risk when teaching bumps up against powerful political and corporate interests.