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.

For example, I recently received an electronic brochure describing the the AALS Clinical Teachers Conference that will take place in 2009. The conference carries the heady sub-title, “Clients, Complexity and Collaboration in a Cross-Disciplinary Lens.” What this boils down to is “adult learning experts” (not law teachers) talking about how to improve teaching. Nothing here about scholarship, or about the justice system. There’s nothing particularly clinical or even legal about the topic– all graduate level professors teach adults. Therefore I’m puzzled by the brochure’s assurance that one of the conference’s two organizing aims is “addressing social justice.” Perhaps the brochure more accurately describes the conference’s second stated aim: “having fun.”

Lest you think that this conference is an aberration, here are topics that were the focus of other recent conferences/workshops: reflecting on teaching and “stuggles to move clinical legal education ahead within the Academy” (2008); challenging assumptions about how clinicians see the world and their hopes and expectations as clinical teachers (2007); and collaborative teaching methods (2006). In their choices of conference topics, cliniicans (who work on social justice issues) seem strangely unwilling to promote scholarship or address problems of social justice and reform of the justice system.

Clinical legal education is very expensive. At some point Deans may begin thinking that a page in the alumni magazine showing a happy client or two hugging a clinical student is not a sufficient return on investment to justify the size of the law school’s clinical program. Clinical educators need to re-energize and re-imagine clinical education. A serious commitment to skills training and engaging in scholarshly analysis of reform of the justice system are two ways to go.