Expert legal commentary: Clinical Legal Education and Legal Education Reform

By Professor Frank S. Bloch
Professor of Law Emeritus, Vanderbilt University School of Law
Executive Secretary, Global Alliance for Justice Education



Professor Frank Bloch

Legal education faces uncertain times, not only in Australia but around the world.  This is due in part to the Global Financial Crisis, which has hit law schools on two fronts: severe budget pressures from their home universities and a shrinking demand for their graduates from the profession.  But there are longer-existing uncertainties about the future of legal education resulting from a widening gap between the legal academy and the legal profession, as both institutions have become more distant from the societies they serve.  How law schools respond to these challenges will dictate the course of legal education for generations to come.

While the nature and degree of these challenges vary among countries (and within countries among law schools), over the past few decades a global clinical movement has emerged as the most consistent and influential force for legal education reform.  With the aim of supporting and developing what has been termed “socially relevant legal education,” clinical courses and clinical programs worldwide share three key characteristics.  The first goes directly to legal education’s primary educational mission by focusing on professional skills training and instilling professional values of public responsibility and social justice.  A second characteristic relates to methodology.  Clinical training in professional skills and values takes place while students are in professional roles and not in a traditional classroom setting where law is taught through one-way lectures or from cases and material presented exclusively in printed texts.  Finally, clinical legal education seeks to support broader legal education reform, including an expansion of the professional curriculum and greater use of innovative teaching methods.

To an outside observer, these characteristics would seem almost self-evident for a professional educational institution.  But detractors point regularly to what they see as a set of inherent contradictions that limit the relevance of clinical legal education to broader legal education reform.  In fact, these supposed contradictions are complementary.  First there is the idea that clinics must focus either on professional skills or on social justice.  While it is true that many clinical programs often emphasize one over the other, virtually all eventually address both.  Educating a more competent and ethical profession is itself a social justice mission.  Next there is the idea that clinics exist either to teach or to provide service.  The traditional view that students go to school to be taught by their teachers—teachers teach and students learn—is upended in a clinical setting where law teachers are also lawyers providing service and students learn while placed in various collaborative relationships, often working with their teachers as colleagues.  The clinical method of teaching professional skills naturally integrates the teaching of professional ethics, social responsibility, and the public role of lawyers by exposing students to issues of social justice as part of their law school experience. 

Greater integration of clinical legal education and its hands-on, experiential interactive teaching method will help move law schools toward a curriculum that results in a more truly competent, ethical, and socially responsible profession.  Clinic students learn, retain, and engage in what they are learning while actively involved in what they are learning to do.  And at the same time, they understand and experience—at a deeply personal level—how lawyers can affect peoples’ lives and how they can help communities address issues of injustice.  This is the key to future legal education reform in these uncertain times.