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Project-Clinical Legal

This document provides an overview of clinical legal education. It discusses how clinical legal education aims to bridge the gap between legal theory and practice by giving students real-world experience through clinics and simulations. The concept originated in the early 20th century and was inspired by the medical clinic model. It allows students to problem solve for real clients under supervision. Clinical legal education has grown significantly since the 1960s and aims to not only teach lawyering skills but also impart responsibilities to facilitate justice and reform. It provides a more holistic education than traditional doctrinal methods alone.

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231 views6 pages

Project-Clinical Legal

This document provides an overview of clinical legal education. It discusses how clinical legal education aims to bridge the gap between legal theory and practice by giving students real-world experience through clinics and simulations. The concept originated in the early 20th century and was inspired by the medical clinic model. It allows students to problem solve for real clients under supervision. Clinical legal education has grown significantly since the 1960s and aims to not only teach lawyering skills but also impart responsibilities to facilitate justice and reform. It provides a more holistic education than traditional doctrinal methods alone.

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You are on page 1/ 6

CLINICAL COURSE-I

PHILOSOPHY OF CLINICS
INDEX
TOPIC

PAGE NO.

INTRODUCTION

5-9

HISTORY

10-13

PURPOSE

14-18

IMPLEMENTATION

19-22

BENEFITS

23-26

CHALLENGES

27-30

CONCLUSION

31-32

BIBLIOGRAPHY

33

INTRODUCTION- WHAT IS CLINICAL LEGAL


EDUCATION?
Law is naturally conceived in a broad perspective as one of several instruments of
social control to be understood in relation to other social institutions and
processes. Interdisciplinary and empirical approaches have become imperative to
the study of law and the curriculum must reflect these goals of law study. The
Clinical Legal Education is necessary to bridge a gap between theory and
practice. The Clinical Legal Education is a term which encompasses learning
which is focused on enabling students to understand how the law works in action.
This can be done by undertaking real or realistic simulated case work. In early
days law is thought as one of the curriculum available to the students. Even
though the casebook method was growing in earlier days, there were critics of this
method from the beginning. However the first hand experience method will really
educate the law students. The legal education clinics if properly channeled may
help the students to gain their knowledge. The use of the word clinic prompts the
analogy of trainee doctors meeting real patients in their medical clinics. Clinical
Legal Education is only one way in which theory and practice can be brought
together. Clinical Legal Education is essentially a multi-disciplined, multipurpose
education which can develop the human resources and idealism needed to
strengthen the legal system a lawyer, a product of such education would be able
to contribute to national development and social change in a much more
constructive manner.
According to Professor Barbara Woodhouse, "perhaps one of the most serious
failings in contemporary legal education is that all too many students graduate

with a vast doctrinal base of knowledge sealed within a context that is not
translatable into practice."1
The term, "clinical legal education" was first used by Jerome Frank, in 1933 in
United States in his article, "Why not a Clinical Lawyer School"2 and has since
then been the focus of attention for improvement of legal education and for
creating a synthesis between the law schools and the legal profession. The legal
clinic concept was first discussed at the turn of the twentieth century by two
professors as a variant of the medical clinic model. Russian professor Alexander I.
Lyublinsky in 1901, quoting an article in a German journal, and American
professor William Rowe, in a 1917 article, each wrote about the concept of a
legal clinic. Both professors associated it with the medical professions tradition
of requiring medical students to train in functioning clinics ministering to real
patients under the supervision of experienced physicians.
Clinical legal education is essential to preparing law students to practice law
effectively.
Clinical Legal Education has been a significant part of legal education since 1960.
The first clinic started in U. K. in 1970 and in Australia in 1990s. The concept is
fast expanding across the globe also.
The clinical method allows students to confront the uncertainties and challenges
of problem solving for clients, to say that the process of learning law in such a
textured manner should be relegated to a certain course or set of courses ignores
what educational theorists have been saying for years: that the best learning takes
place when the broad range of abilities we possess is engaged.
1 John B. Mitchell, Betsy R. Hollingsworth,
Patricia Clark & Raven Lidman, And Then
Suddenly Seattle University Was on its Way
to a Parallel, Integrative Curriculum, 2 Clin.
L. Rev. 1, 21 (1995).

2 81 UPA. L. Rev. 907 (1933).


3

According to Professor Richard Neumann,


Because it does not expect itself to produce practitioners, legal education is in
some ways closer to graduate liberal arts education than it is to professional
education as other professions define it. . . . It would be unthinkable to graduate
physicians with no clinical clerkships or architects with no experience in a design
studio.3
Practical Law strives to integrate theory and practice within the LLB curriculum
by using clinical methodology for teaching students substantive and procedural
law and skills. This is done mainly through the delivery of legal services to the
indigent, thereby promoting access to justice for them and fostering a
commitment in the students to build a society based on democratic values, social
justice and fundamental human rights. Clinical legal education can be looked at
both as a methodology and as an area of scholarly enquiry, i.e. a subject, or from a
broader philosophical perspective. As a subject it is the study of what lawyers
actually do in practice.
The term clinical legal education or law clinic, traditionally refers to a nonprofit
law practice usually serving a public interest or group in the society that are in an
underprivileged or exposed situation and (for various reasons) lack access to
legal system.
Clinical legal education has wider goals of enabling law students to understand
and assimilate responsibilities as a member of public service in the administration
of the law, in the reform of the law, in the equitable distribution of the legal
services in the society, in the protection of individual rights and public interests
and in upholding the basic elements of professionalism. Clinical experience in
law school thus offers a unique opportunity for students to learn under
supervision, not only about the professional skills used by lawyers but also about
many aspects of the hidden curriculum essential for preparation to think and act
3 Richard K. Neumann, Jr., Donald Schon,
The Reflective Practitioner, and the
Comparative Failures of Legal Education, 6
Clin. L. Rev. 401, 404 (2000).

like a lawyer. Instead of being just a craftsman manipulating advocacy skill, the
present society needs the lawyer to be equipped for policy planning and advisory
roles.
As a philosophy clinical legal education aims to change and restructure
institutionalized legal education, producing a philosophy about the role of lawyers
in society: "To create visible models of justice in action to demonstrate a deep
commitment to achieving justice and to challenge injustice, teaching law students
that the privileged class of lawyers possess the responsibility to facilitate a just
society."
The Bar Council of India, constituted under the Indian Advocates Act, 1961, is
endowed with the responsibility by the Parliament to prescribe and maintain the
standards of legal education in consultation with State Bar Councils and
Universities teaching law. The Rules which the Council brought into force from
June 1982 distinguish professional education from other forms of legal education.
Recognizing the importance of dissemination of legal knowledge for promotion of
democracy and constitutional government, the Council exhorted Universities to
devise ways and means appropriate to their situations for liberal legal education.
The Council insists on strict standards in professional legal education, and in this
regard, it has laid down a required curriculum with some possible adjustments in
details for accommodating local needs and requirements.
The goal of professional legal education is to equip students to perform the
various roles which lawyers are expected to play in our society. The modern
emphasis on humanistic and policy oriented goals in legal education can be
gauged from the inclusion of instruction in law related social science subjects and
humanities in the law courses.
The clinical component of legal education, which has been the most neglected
aspect so far, requires some priority attention if a fair balance is to be achieved
between the doctrinal and empirical goals of the new curriculum. Clinical
education offers unique opportunities for students professional and intellectual
development. Clinical programmes can be conceived much more broadly and
5

imaginatively than conventional patterns of legal education. The perceptional,


instrumental and operational aspects of the lawyering process and the legal
system are all presented in the clinical work.
Practical training through legal aid activity and other clinical programmes can
give experience not only in traditional skills of advocacy essential for every
lawyer but more importantly in direct involvement in delivery of legal services to
the people. Practical training can also give education in approaching ethical and
moral issues and in intelligent use of value choices in professional work. Further,
it tends to promote a humanistic, people-oriented, public-interest-based
professionalism which the society legitimately expects from its lawyers.

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