The Global Evolution Of Clinical Legal Education

Clinical legal education has revolutionized legal education, from its deepest origins in the nineteenth century to its now-global reach.

Globally, the methodologies of legal education have not changed in any fundamental way, some methods dating back hundreds of years. Law schools have relied, for too long, on passive learning methods such as lectures or cases. Clinical legal education provides an alternative that is more than just another pedagogical method. It provides a way for students to experience their emerging professional selves, while providing services or projects with poor and underrepresented clients. This book documents both the historical origins of clinical experiments in the earliest days of US university legal education, and the now-global reach of clinical pedagogy as a proven tool for effective training of legal professionals.

With chapters written by leading clinical legal educators from every region of the world, this book demonstrates how the expansion of clinical programs has spawned an emerging global movement that can advance social justice through legal education.

This edited book addresses contemporary challenges in clinical legal education (CLE), considering its role in legal education and in the broader community it serves. Written by experts from various international contexts, the book explores how the changing nature and requirements of legal practice alongside social and technological developments affect the pedagogy of clinical legal education. Chapters chart the development of clinical legal education across various jurisdictions and examine developments in programme design and supervision of and in CLE along with the role of CLE in the community. The authors also reflect on the dynamic and developing role of clinical legal education and offer recommendations for the future. This book will be essential reading for academics, researchers in clinical legal education, and those interested in legal education across the world. It will also be of interest to students of clinical legal education whose research requires a deeper understanding of the current themes and issues of the subject.

Influential articles on the evolution of clinical legal education over the past three decades, by members of the founding generation of clinical law professors.

Clinical legal education is of increasing significance to law schools in Australia and across the globe. The potential to combine community service with student learning distinguishes clinical teaching from other forms of legal education. This book considers how to best recognise and realise the contributions that experiential learning methodologies can make to legal education. It identifies the contributions that clinical programs can make to student learning, social justice, community engagement and research. In this book, Jeff Giddings provides a framework for understanding both the pedagogical and political dimensions of the establishment and sustainability of clinical programs. He uses in-depth historical case studies of major Australian clinical programs to identify how various interested groups can harness the great potential of clinical legal education.

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This edited collection provides a comprehensive analysis of the differences and similarities between civil legal aid schemes in the Nordic countries whilst outlining recent legal aid transformations in their respective welfare states. Based on in-depth studies of Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and Iceland, the authors compare these cases with legal aid in Europe and the US to examine whether a single, unique Nordic model exists. Contextualizing Nordic legal aid in relation to welfare ideology and human rights, Hammerslev and Halvorsen Rønning consider whether flaws in the welfare state exist, and how legal aid affects disadvantaged citizens. Concluding that the five countries all have very different legal aid schemes, the authors explore an important general trend: welfare states increasingly outsourcing legal aid to the market and the third sector through both membership organizations and smaller voluntary organizations. A methodical and compassionate text, this book will be of special interest to scholars and students of the criminal justice, the welfare state, and the legal aid system.