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Western Europe: Last Holdout in the Worldwide Acceptance of Clinical Legal Education

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2019

Richard J. Wilson

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I have come to believe, over the last two decades of my consulting work outside of the United States, that the origins, growth and acceptance of clinical legal education throughout the world is the greatest single innovation in law school pedagogy – and certainly in student learning – since the “science” of the Socratic, case method was brought to Harvard by Christopher Columbus Langdell. I remember distinctly when I came to this conclusion. It was around the time of a conference held at beautiful Arrowhead Lake, in California, hosted by UCLA Law School and the University of London at the university's conference facility in the mountains of San Bernardino County, startlingly close to Los Angeles. The event was the Sixth International Clinical Conference, held in October of 2005, and it was the first truly international event in that series. Yes, it was an “international” clinical conference, and prior events had provided participants with something of an international flavor, and the event was sponsored by British and American law schools. This, however, was something new, something different.

Type
Section 2: ‘Geared Toward Practice?’ Assessing the Current Law School Race to Legal Skills-Building
Information
German Law Journal , Volume 10 , Issue 6-7: Following the Call of the Wild: The Promises and Perils of Transnationalizing Legal Education , July 2009 , pp. 823 - 846
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 by German Law Journal GbR 

References

1 The official website for the Sixth Conference is available at: http://www.law.ucla.edu/home/index.asp?page=1917, visited on March 12, 2009. The conference papers cited hereafter are available at: http://www.law.ucla.edu/home/index.asp?page=1949, visited on March 12, 2009.Google Scholar

2 Id., Frank S. Bloch and M.R.K. Prasad, Institutionalizing a Social Justice Mission for Clinical Legal Education: Cross-national Currents from India and the United States; Id. Margaret Martin Berry, Martin Geer, Catherine F. Klein and Ved Kumari, Justice Education and the Evaluation Process (discussing faculty evaluation in clinical and nonclinical courses in the United States, India and other countries).Google Scholar

3 Id., Elbashan, Yuval, Teaching Justice, Creating Law – The Legal Clinic as a Laboratory (discussing clinical legal education at Hebrew University in Jerusalem).Google Scholar

4 Id., Peter Joy, Shigeo Miagawa, Takao Suami & Weisselberg, Charles D., Building Clinical Legal Education Programs in A county Without a Tradition of Graduate Professional Legal Education: Japan Educational Reform as a Case Study (discussing clinical legal education at Waseda Law School in Tokyo, Japan). Google Scholar

5 Id., Anischik, Oleg, Situation in Clinical Legal Education in Russia and Activities of Clinical Legal Education Foundation (CLEF). Google Scholar

6 Id., Zhen, Zhen, The Present Situation and Prosperous Future of China Clinical Legal Education; Dou Mei, Lin Lei & Wu Zhongming, An Innovation in Clinical Law Education of Nationalities Universities. Google Scholar

7 Id., Phil Falk, Keryn Ruska, Jeff Giddings & Stainlay, Maree, Legal Clinics and Indigenous Australian Student Learning. Google Scholar

8 Ed Rekosh, founding director of the Public Interest Law Institute, in Budapest, delivered a paper at the 1998 conference. Edwin Rekosh, Possibilities for Clinical Legal Education in Central and Eastern Europe (1998), available at: http://www.pili.org/en/content/view/158/26/, visited on March 12, 2009.Google Scholar

9 This exercise, and others, are among the games and other techniques I have used in teaching lawyer skills, as set out in Wilson, The New Legal Education, at 454 et seq.Google Scholar

10 USAID/Russia, American Bar Association Rule of Law Initiative, Projects: Development of the Legal Profession, available at; http://russia.usaid.gov/about/partners/ABA_ROLI/, visited on March 20, 2009.Google Scholar

11 Wilson, Richard J., Criminal Justice in Revolutionary Nicaragua: Intimations of the Adversarial in Socialist and Civil Law Traditions, 23 University of Miami Inter-American law Review 269 (1991-92), summarizes that experience.Google Scholar

12 Wilson, Richard J., The New Legal Education in North and South America, 25 Stanford Journal of International Law 375 (1989). This was my first foray into the teaching of law school pedagogical methods, clinical and nonclinical, to traditional classroom and clinical professors in Latin America.Google Scholar

13 Wilson, Richard J., Three Law School Clinics in Chile, 1970–2000: Innovation, Resistance and Conformity in the Global South, 8 Clinical Law Review 801 (2002).Google Scholar

14 See, e.g., Bloch, Frank S., Access to Justice and the Global Clinical Movement, 28 Washington University Journal of Law and Policy 111 (2008); Wortham, Leah, Aiding Clinical Legal Education Abroad: What Can Be Gained and the Learning Curve on How to Do So Effectively, 12 Clinical Law Review 615 (2006).Google Scholar

15 Data on the number of clinics at all American law schools, and on the total number of clinical teachers, is still somewhat preliminary. The most comprehensive source is the data collected from 131 of the more than 190 U.S. law schools by the Center for the Study of Applied Legal Education, at the University of Michigan Law School. See, CSALE, Report on the 2007–2008 Survey, at 9, available at http://www.csale.org/CSALE.07-08.Survey.Report.pdf, visited on March 20, 2009.Google Scholar

16 American Bar Association, Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, An Education Continuum, Report of the Task Force on Law Schools and the Professions: Closing the Gap (The MacCrate Report) (July 1992) available at: http://www.abanet.org/legaled/publications/onlinepubs/maccrate.html, visited on March 20, 2009.Google Scholar

17 American Bar Association, Standards for Accreditation of Law Schools, Standard 301(a), 302(a)(4); 302(b)(1), 405(c). See, Peter A. Joy & Robert R. Kuehn, The Evolution of ABA Standards for Clinic Faculty, 75 Tennessee Law Review 183 (2008).Google Scholar

18 william m. sullivan et al., educating lawyers: preparation for the profession of law (2007).Google Scholar

19 CLEA, Best Practices for Legal Education (2006), available at http://bestpracticeslegaled.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/best_practices-full.pdf, visited on March 20, 2009.Google Scholar

20 Perhaps the most comprehensive such bibliography is the one introduced by Karen Czapanskiy, and maintained by J.P. “Sandy” Ogalvy, available at: http://faculty.cua.edu/ogilvy/Index1.htm (as of October 2005), visited on March 20, 2009.Google Scholar

21 See, e.g. Dinerstein, Robert D., A Meditation on the Theoretics of Practice, 43 Hastings Law Journal 971 (1992).,Google Scholar

22 McCutcheon, Aubrey, University Legal Aid Clinics: A Growing International Presence with Manifold Benefits, in Many Roads to Justice: The Law Related Work of Ford Foundation Grantees Around the World 267 (Mary McClymont & Stephen Golub eds., 2000).Google Scholar

23 See, e.g., the Rule of Law Initiative's web page on Legal Education Reform and Civic Education, available at: http://www.abanet.org/rol/programs/resource_legal_education.html, visited on March 12, 2009.Google Scholar

24 See, e.g., (author?)Clinical Legal Education: Forming the Next Generation of Lawyers, in Pursuing the Public Interest: A Handbook for Legal Professionals and Activists 257 (Edwin Rekosh, Kyra A. Buchko & Vessela Terzieva eds., 2001).Google Scholar

25 Educating for Justice: Social Values and Legal Education (Jeremy Cooper & Louise G. Trubek eds., 1997)(discussing clinical innovations in Sri Lanka and Australia); Educating for Justice Around the World: Legal Education, Legal Practice and the Community (Louise G. Trubek & Jeremy Cooper eds., 1999) (discussing clinical innovations in Thailand, Chile and Argentina).Google Scholar

26 Enseñanza Clínica del Derecho: Una Alternativa a los Métodos Tradicionales de Formación de Abogados (Clinical Legal Education: An Alternative to the Traditional Methods for Lawyer Training) (Marta Villareal & Christian Courtis eds., 2007) (my translation)Google Scholar

27 There is, for example, the series of books published by the Diego Portales Law School in Santiago, Chile on public interest clinics in Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Mexico and Peru. The first in that series is Defensa Jurídica del Interés Pública: Enseñanza, Estrategias, Experiencias (Legal Defense of the Public Interest: Teaching, Strategies, Experiences) (Chile, Felipe González & Felipe Viveros eds., 1999).Google Scholar

28 See, e.g., Schrag, Philip G. & Meltsner, Michael, Reflections on Clinical Legal Education (1998).Google Scholar

29 See, e.g., Rice, S., A Guide to Implementing Clinical Teaching Method in the Law School Curriculum (1996); Marlene Le Brun & Richard Johnstone, The Quiet (R)Evolution: Improving Student Learning in Law (1994) (exploring clinical and other teaching innovations in legal education).Google Scholar

30 A Handbook on Clinical Legal Education (N.R. Madhava Menon ed., 1998).Google Scholar

31 Hugh Brayne, Nigel Duncan & Richard Grimes, Clinical Legal Education: Active Learning in Your Law School (1998); Effective Learning & Teaching in Law (Roger Burridge et al. eds., 2002).Google Scholar

32 My colleague, Elliott Milstein, has set out this range of possibilities in his own writing. Elliott S. Milstein, Clinical Legal Education in the United States: In-House Clinics, Externships and Simulations, 51 Journal of Legal Education 375 (2001).Google Scholar

33 See, Wilson (note 11), 241.Google Scholar

34 Wilson, Richard J., Training for Justice: The Global Reach of Clinical Legal Education, 22 Penn State International Law Review 421, 422–423 (2004). The article suggests six components. I deemed two components as redundant, and have combined them into one.Google Scholar

35 Sullivan (note 18), 192.Google Scholar

36 Abel, Richard L., Lawyers in the Civil Law World, in Lawyers in Society: The Civil Law World (Richard L. Abel & Philip CS. Lewis, eds., Vol. 1) 1, 31–35 (1988).Google Scholar

37 Erhard Blankenburg and Ulrike Schultz, German Advocates: A Highly Regulated Profession, in Lawyers in Society: An Overview 92 (Richard L. Abel & Philip S.C. Lewis eds., 1995).Google Scholar

38 Abel, Richard L., Revisioning Lawyers, in Lawyers in Society: An Overview 1,4 (Richard L. Abel & Philip S.C. Lewis eds., 1995).Google Scholar

39 Brayne (note 31), 5. Brayne and his colleagues note that there is a national organization of clinical teachers, the Clinical Legal Education Organization (CLEO).Google Scholar

40 Andreas Bücker and William A. Woodruff, The Bologna Process and German Legal Education: Developing Professional Competence Through Clinical Experiences, 9 German Law Journal 575, 613 (2008).Google Scholar

41 Steiner, Eva, French Legal Method 193 (2002).Google Scholar

42 See, supra, note 41, 192.Google Scholar

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46 Bücker and Woodruff, supra note 40, 610.Google Scholar

47 Abel, , supra note 36, 18.Google Scholar

48 Blankenberg and Schultz, supra note 37, 100.Google Scholar

49 One can note, for example, that two of the most successful clinics in Chile are mandatory programs integrated into the last years of study at two of the largest-enrollment universities in the country, the University of Chile and the Catholic University of Chile. Wilson, supra note 13.Google Scholar

50 Blankenberg and Shultz suggest that the drop-out rate in German law schools is about 50% in the first phase, and about 25% in the second phase, supra note 37, 99.Google Scholar

51 Lempereur, Alain, Negotiation and Mediation in France: The Challenge of Skill-Based Learning and Interdisciplinary Research in Legal Education, 3 Harvard Negotiation Law Review 151, 164 (1998).Google Scholar

52 Wilson, , supra note 13, 570–573.Google Scholar

53 See, e.g., Chavkin, David F., Am I My Client's Lawyer: Role Definition and the Clinical Supervisor, 51 Southern Methodist University Law Review 1507 (1998) (containing, in Appendix A, at 1546, a listing of student practice rules by state in the United States).Google Scholar

54 Trubek, David M. et al., Global Restructuring and the Law: Studies of the Internationalization of Legal Fields and the Creation of Transnational Arenas, 44 Case Western Law Review 407, 447 (1994).Google Scholar

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56 Jouannet, Emmanuelle, French and American Perspectives on International Law: Legal Cultures and International Law, 58 Maine Law Review 292, 294 (2006).Google Scholar

57 Nollent, , supra note 43, 283.Google Scholar

58 Genty, Philip M., Overcoming Cultural Blindness in International Clinical Collaboration: The Divide Between Civil and Common Law Cultures and Its Implications for Clinical Education, 15 Clinical Law Review 131, 137 (2008).Google Scholar

59 Nollent, , supra note 43, 287.Google Scholar

60 Sullivan, , supra note 18, 4; Laura I. Appleman, The Rise of the Modern American Law School: How Professionalization, German Scholarship, and Legal Reform Shaped Our System of Legal Education, 39 New England Law Review 251, 274–283 (2005).Google Scholar

61 Stuckey, Roy T., Preparing Students to Practice Law: A Global Problem in Need of Global Solutions, 43 South Texas Law Review 649, 663 (2002).Google Scholar

62 Genty, , supra note 58, 152–153.Google Scholar

63 Abel, , supra note 34, 13.Google Scholar

64 Kohler, Jürgen, Selecting Minds: The Recruitment of Law Professors in Germany, 41 American Journal of Comparative Law 413, 417 (1994). The same appears to be true in France. C. Mouly and C. Atias, Faculty Recruitment in France, 41 American Journal of Comparative Law 401 (1993).Google Scholar

65 See, e.g., comments by Heribert Hirte, current president of the European Law Faculties Association (ELFA), and professor at the University of Hamburg, in Symposium, Enriching the Law School Curriculum in an Increasingly Interrelated World – Learning from Each Other, 26 Penn State International Law Review 831, 897–898 (2008). Of interest is a recent study by the ABA Section on Legal Education, designated the “Out of the Box Committee”, whose mandate was to try thinking “outside of the box,” meaning a look beyond traditional boundaries, on needed reforms in legal education. One of their conclusions suggested the possibility of extending legal education in the United States to four years while cutting undergraduate studies to three years, primarily because of the growth in the fields of international law, health law, employment law and intellectual property, as well as administrative aspects of the “welfare state.” The very first reform suggested by the committee was the “shameful neglect” by law schools of what it called the “transformative effect of globalization of the practice of law.” ABA Section on Legal Education: Out of the Box Committee Report (November 2008), on file with the author.Google Scholar

66 Bücker and Woodruff, supra note 40, 611.Google Scholar

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68 Terry, Laurel S., The Bologna Process and Its Impact in Europe: It's So Much More than Degree Changes, 41 Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law 107, 113–114 (2008).Google Scholar

69 Two good examples of English-language critiques are both by Johannes Riedel, a civil servant in the Justice Ministry of North-Rhine/Westphalia in Düsseldorf. Johannes Riedel, LL.M., The Reform of Legal Education in Germany, European Law Faculties Association, available at: http://elfa-afde.eu/EJLEISSUES‥aspx, visited on February 26, 2009; Johannes Riedel, The Bologna Process and Its Relevance for Legal Education in Germany, 2 European Journal of Legal Education 1 (2005).Google Scholar

70 Riedel (2001), supra note 69, 4.Google Scholar

71 Riedel (2005), supra note 69, 62.Google Scholar

72 See, Hovannisian, Lusine, Clinical Legal Education and the Bologna Process, PILI Papers, No. 2, December 2006.Google Scholar

73 Terry, , supra, note 68; Frans Vanistendael, Blitz Survey of the Challenges for Legal Education in Europe, 18 Dickenson Journal of International Law 457 (2000); Vanistendael, Frans, Curricular Changes in Europe Law Schools, 22 Penn State International Law Review 455 (2004); Louis F. Del Duca, Cooperation in Internationalizing Legal Education in Europe – Emerging New Players, 20 Penn State International Law Review 7 (2001).Google Scholar

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76 The CCBE Recommendations on Training Outcomes for European Lawyers are set out in the Symposium, supra note 65, at 902.Google Scholar

77 Tuning Legal Studies in Europe: Initial Findings, Report of QUAACAS to the General Assembly of ELFA, Hamburg 2008, available at C:\Documents and Settings\My Documents\Research\QUAACAS\ Hamburg Report\QUAACAS Report 02.doc.Google Scholar

78 Johnsen, Jon T., Nordic Legal Aid, 5 Maryland Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues 301, 328 (1994).Google Scholar

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81 Olszak, Norbert, La Professionnalisation des Etudes de Droit: Pour le Developpement d'un Enseignement Clinique, 18/7203 Recueil Dalloz 1172 (5 May 2005), cited in Hovannisian, supra note 72, 20, n. 43.Google Scholar

82 The Tarragona clinic is mentioned in Hovannisian (note 72), 16, and was contacted by the author for a visit during the summer of 2007. The author has held a seminar for aspiring clinical teachers in December of 2006 in Avila, Spain, with the collaboration of Diego Blázquez. See Diego Blázquez Martín, Apuntes Acerca de la Educación Jurídica Clínica, 3 Revista de Filosofía, Derecho y Política 43 (invierno 2005/2006).Google Scholar

83 The Amsterdam clinic is mentioned in Hovannisian, supra, note 72. The author made a visit to Utrecht to discuss formation of a human rights clinic there, in conjunction with the law faculty and the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights (SIM) during the winter of 2006, and will be in residence as a visiting scholar there during the fall semester of 2009.Google Scholar

84 Bücker and Woodruff, supra note 40, 611.Google Scholar

85 Rekosh, Edwin, Constructing Public Interest Law: Collaborative Development in Central and Eastern Europe, (draft article for publication in the UCLA Journal of International Law and Foreign Affairs, March 2008, on file with the author. Cited with permission.), at 29, (supra notes 88 and 89).Google Scholar

86 European Court of Human Rights, Press Release: Press Conference with the President of the European Court of Human Rights, at http://cmiskp.echr.coe.int/tkp197/view.asp?action=html&documentld=846335&portal=hbkm&source=externalbydocnumber&table=F69A27FD8FB86142BF01C1166DEA398649 (Jan. 29, 2009), visited on March 20, 2009.Google Scholar

87 See, Hurwitz, Deena, Lawyering for Justice: The Inevitability of International Human Rights Clinics, 28 Yale Journal of International Law 505 (2003) (Identifying, in Appendix, at 549, 34 human rights clinics or centers in the United States); Carrillo, Arturo J., Bringing International Law Home: The Innovative Role of Human Rights Clinics in the Transnational Legal Process, 35 Columbia Human Rights Law Review 527 (2004).Google Scholar