ABSTRACTS
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
James Moliterno, Washington and Lee University, USA
Globalization of the Legal Clinic
The Legal Clinic has evolved into one of the most forward-looking, global features of today’s legal education. What is a clinic? A part of the education or qualification of a lawyer that is accomplished within the role of lawyer, sometimes doing actual service and sometimes simulated service. From the most local of possible beginnings, a single apprentice learning the local practice of a mentor, the legal clinic has grown to be among the most global of all aspects of a modern legal education. Throughout the US, clinics have expanded their horizons and now embrace international law and human rights issues. Throughout Central and Eastern Europe (Continental Western Europe is behind in this area) as well as Asia, clinics have become a standard part of legal education.
Neil Gold, University of Windsor, Canada
Fostering Professionalism and a Professional Identity
Clinical legal education offers the best opportunities to learn professionalism and to assist students in the development of an individual professional identity. Ironically, both conventional legal education and clinical legal education may pose a threat to the acquisition of a professional identity that meets appropriate standards. This session will refer to the work of scholars in moral development interpreted in the context of legal and medical education and the research into role modelling primarily in medical education. It aims to demonstrate the need to teach moral development and professionalism directly, preferably in the clinical setting abetted by a morally robust legal education outside of clinics.
PARALLEL SESSIONS
Afolasade Adewumi and Oluyemisi Bamgbose, University of Ibadan, Nigeria
Attitude of Staff and Students to Clinical Legal Education: A Case Study of Faculty of Law, University of Ibadan
Change animates. It brings about challenges thereby removing atrophy, it makes room for new experiences, experimentation and adaptation leading to the opening up of new horizons and ultimately growth. People rarely want to take up new experiences especially the conservatives and the legal profession happens to be a conservative one.
The students of the Faculty of Law, University of Ibadan were introduced to the clinical way of legal education with the inauguration of the Women’s Law Clinic in the faculty. This paper is a reflection of the attitude of the staff and the students of the faculty to this development.
Emmanuel Akhigbe and Abdulhakeem Abdulqadir Tijani, Ambrose Alli University, Nigeria
Review of Law Clinic Operations: Ambrose Alli University Law Clinic in Perspective
Following agitations from the academic community, with particular reference to Nigeria, for the need to equip students at the tertiary level with more functional and clinical education, clinical legal education was incorporated into the curriculum, both as course and instructional/methodological components, at that level and has , so far, enjoyed some level of compliance in most Nigerian Universities . So as to expose law students to the invaluable practical benefits associated with this line of instruction, the concept of creating within every Faculty of Law a unit aimed at achieving this purpose was formulated and the ‘Law Clinics’ established. Overtime, the Nigerian Law Clinics, in collaboration with International Organizations, Non-Governmental Organizations and other Civil Liberty Societies , have proved to be very useful instruments of social transformation, information and integration and have also served as vehicles of reaching out to the ordinary people on the street on vital matters of social , cultural and legal relevance . Very active in this respect is the Law Clinic, Ambrose Alli University, Ekpoma, Edo State, Nigeria (the “Law Clinic”). This paper therefore examines, albeit briefly, the concepts of ‘Law Clinic’ and ‘Clinical Education’ and ‘Operations’ generally in Nigeria. I t s prime concerns will be to x-ray the Law Clinic vis a vis its modus operandi, prospects and limitations. The discourse stretches further to reviewing the major projects undertaken by the Law Clinic in the last five (5) years, without failing to identify their resultant impact s both on the clinicians and the target community, as well as major challenges confronted within the course of executing these projects. The paper concludes with viable recommendations on ways to better the Law Clinic’s operations.
Dianne Anagnos and Denise Wasley, UNSW, Australia
Teaching more than the law – reflections on helping students develop workplace skills and relationships in a clinical setting
Kingsford Legal Centre offers a range of clinical legal education courses to students at the UNSW Australia (UNSW). The bulk of our work is in teaching elective experiential learning courses in a community legal centre setting, to students nearing the completion of their degrees. We have developed broad assessment criteria for these courses to make sure that our students develop skills in professional reflective practice.
Students come to the Centre with limited workplace experience, various levels of ability and different expectations of their clinical legal experience. Just like every clinic, some of our students present with particular issues that challenge us in how we work with them to make sure that they are making progress across all our assessment criteria. Challenges we frequently face include working with students who lack confidence/are over-confident, have trouble with communicating in English, are resistant to receiving feedback or do not easily fit into the team-based workplace culture of a community legal centre. These students will usually require closer supervision and feedback on aspects of their work that are not necessarily about their legal knowledge, but may be about their social aptitude or general workplace skills instead. Occasionally this can lead to conflict situations.
This workshop will use case-studies and years of collated student feedback to allow participants to reflect and share experiences of the way we teach students who present particular challenges. We will look at what our students over the years have told us about how their experience at KLC has impacted on their workplace skills, confidence, communication skills and ability to work in a team. We will also explore the limits of our role in supervising students in a clinical legal education setting and how far this supervision and mentoring should go.
We will draw on a range of research in supervision including that of Jeff Giddings and the Best Practices in Australian Clinical legal education.
Marguerite Angelari, Open Society Justice Initiative
The Role for University Law Clinics in the Legal Empowerment and State Guaranteed Legal Aid Movements
University law clinics share many of the goals of the legal empowerment and state guaranteed legal aid movements. Nonetheless, these movements are moving ahead without substantial involvement of the clinical community. This session will describe existing collaborations, discuss challenges, and explore the potential for further engagement by clinics and clinical law professors.
Collaborations between clinics and legal empowerment projects are few and far between. In addition, with little exception, clinical law professors are not engaged in higher level advocacy on legal empowerment. This presentation will start with an overview of the legal empowerment movement, and then describe successful partnerships between university law clinics and legal empowerment projects where law students and community based paralegals work together. Lastly, it will explore the potential for clinics to increase their engagement in the legal empowerment movement both at direct service and policy level.
In contrast to legal empowerment projects, it is not uncommon for university law clinics to work closely with legal aid provider organizations. In some countries, clinics are actually certified legal aid providers and receive funding through state guaranteed legal services laws. Nonetheless, the extent to which clinics have joined in advocacy efforts to establish state guaranteed legal aid programs has been limited. This part of the session will examine partnerships between legal aid services providers and clinics, discuss the advantages and disadvantages of seeking legal aid funds for clinics, and encourage clinics to join the movement to advocate for state funded legal aid in countries where they do not already exist.
Nicola Antoniou and Patrick Hassan-Morlai, University of East London, UK
Live client clinics: bridging the gap
There has been a shift in attitudes towards clinical learning as part of the student learning experience at universities. Modern Universities are now trying to integrate practical based learning. The view the University of East London adopts in preparing students for the world beyond the university is that “Students do not deserve to be handed a flat-pack degree without any extras – they deserve a fully rounded education and that is what they will get if they come [to UEL].” The University of East London’s Legal Advice Centre is a central vehicle to achieving this aim. If our graduates and graduates everywhere else are to meet the expectations of employers, then universities should acknowledge the virtue of learning by doing or experimenting.
We propose that live client clinics are more beneficial than simulated clinics, as the unpredictability allows for a more realistic experience. The live client clinic can be particularly good at providing students with opportunities to examine access to justice, quality of legal services issues, the development of ethical awareness and understanding of professional conduct rules. This enables students to bridge the gap between their theoretical studies and actually working in a law firm. In fact, those looking for a career in law will have the benefit of such practical experience.
This paper will look at the development of the Legal Advice Centre at the University of East London, and the shift in attitudes toward clinic learning. We will take a look at the success stories that our students have had, including the practical skills and benefits gained when trying to bridge the gap between the study and practice of law.
Sergei Apanasevich, Academy of Public Administration, Belarus
Overcoming academic resistance: CLE in the curriculum
Widespread approach to CLE as a legal help mechanism causes problems when the CLE incorporates into the classic educational process. The "classical" academic doesn’t seem to understand the law clinic as a form (method) combining teaching practice (competence formed in the process of working with the real case), and, most important and paramount, knowledge and skills that are acquired in the process of the student training within CLE (courses of professional ethics, legal writing techniques, methods of legal research, the project approach in professional activities and so on). The last block is often simply ignored.
Innovation nature of CLE from the point of view of classical academics includes the existence of the clinic (as a method of training) and the formation of competences. The main thing is that these competencies are formulated and updated outside the officially prescribed in the legislation. Employers today generally require competences more far from the legislative requirements. Here clinic may become a means of feedback.
In Belarus, for today we are positioning CLE through a clear understanding of the difference between practice - training process (special training courses) and the provision of legal services - practice in the clinic. Raising the question of the development of practice - courses in the formation of CLE; are working with the professional community and professional list of competencies and their subsequent inclusion in the legislation.
Jessica Austen, Victoria Speed, Emma Blackstone and Mathew Gray, BPP University, UK
Running a clinic on limited resources – alternatives to the conventional clinic model
The session will open with a consideration of the resource issues faced by clinics generally and will highlight the difficulties that BPP has identified from evidence supplied by our clinics in operation across the country over the last 12 months.
Having identified the barriers faced by our clinics, the session will then explore the different methods that we have engaged to combat these issues:
1 The ‘pop up’ clinic model. Our original (Award winning) Dalston Pop-Up Advice Shop offers consumer and debt advice at a Hackney library. Dalston Form Filling clinic provides assistance with complex benefits applications. Lambeth Pop-Up Legal Clinic duplicates the Dalston model, providing advice in Streatham Library. We will look at how the external nature of the ‘pop up’ model directly addresses key resources issues.
2 Partnership with law firms to offer a specialist advice service. Using our own experience of law firm partnership, we will consider the merits of engaging a firm, as opposed to an individual lawyer, to increase the pool of available supervisors and explore whether it is beneficial to specialise in clinic.
3 Skype clinic. This is due to be piloted in Leeds in September and already runs in partnership with a law centre and law firm in London. We consider the impact this has had from a resources perspective, in terms of sourcing and engaging external lawyers in clinic supervision.
4 We will explain the practical process of setting up alternative clinics and include interviews with representatives of some of the partners we have worked with.
We will aim to show how these models can provide a useful and less resource-intensive alternative to conventional clinics in providing access to justice in the wake of LASPO. We will also explore the impact these alternatives have had on the student clinic experience.
The session will conclude with a debate on the relative advantages and disadvantages of the alternative clinic models compared with conventional clinics.
Patricia Becker, Federal University of Rio Grande du Sul, Brazil
Interdisciplinarity, empowerment and access to justice in the Brazilian experience of the Student Legal Clinic of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul
Serviço de Assessoria Jurídica Universitária (SAJU) is a Student Legal Clinic registered as an Outreach Program of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS). The SAJU is a program of academic legal advice for the protection of human rights and democracy emerged in 1950, is the first and the largest in Brazil. As a program associated with the university, the organization does not receive any substantial funding, neither private nor public, receiving mainly scholarships for specific outreach projects. At a national level, SAJU is an active member and one of the founders of the RENAJU network, composed by all the student legal clinics throughout Brazil. Recently the program SAJU in partnership with other organizations presented a Petition to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) alleging violations of Human Rights during Social Protest in Brazil. The hearing occurred on March 28th in Washington,D.C., and comes after the rise of numerous mass public demonstrationsacross Brazil since June 2013. Importantly, the SAJU is a program with more than two hundred volunteer, making difference in the lives of more than two thousand people and integrates human rights network with more than 50 non-governmental organizations. According to SAJU’s regulation, the main social tasks of the institution are the commitment to human rights, the spirit of democracy, justice, fraternity, equality and cooperation. Moreover, the humanity education of the members of SAJU is essential for the training of lawyers committed to human rights and social emancipation.