CELL Blog | Center for Engaged Learning in the Law

Clinical Education, RIP. I hope that this hypothetical epitaph spurs clinicians to re-imagine an educational methodology that seems to have seriously lost its way. Most clinical courses fail to enhance students’ lawyering skills in any significant way. The reason is that clinicians focus courses on narrow types of legal problems rather than on skills chosen because they are complex and therefore worthy of analysis and training in law school. Most “innovative” clinical courses consist only of pouring the same wine into differently shaped bottles, as clinicians apply the same methodology to different types of legal problems. Not surprisingly, clinicians continue to grapple with security-of-employment issues.

The rudderless nature of clinical legal education is nowhere more apparent than in clinicians’ choices of conference topics. (Unlike other AALS sections, clinicians have persuaded the AALS that they are entitled to a conference or workshop every year.) You might think that since clinical education focuses on legal problems of the poor and disenfranchised, conferences would customarily be devoted to scholarship concerning structural problems that plague our system of justice and distribution of legal services. But this is decidedly not what happens. Continue Reading »