Bringing Clinical Learning into a Conventional Classroom

Abstract

Some forms of clinical legal education have been part of Australian legal education for many years. However, the focus of this clinical legal education has tended to emphasize either practice-oriented skills training, such as in the post graduate legal practice courses, or client service, which is emphasised at the Kingsford Legal Clinic, the Monash/Springvale program and the proposed Queensland program. 1 Although attention to clinical legal education has increased recently among university based law schools in Australia, 2 there is still some of the unfortunate polarization of views which marked the early days of the US debate about clinical legal education 3 Conventional law teachers criticize clinical legal education for being limited to narrow, vocationally directed skills training, lacking rigour and a sufficient theoretical perspective, while clinicians accuse conventional academic legal education of being too theoretical or abstract, limited to narrow doctrinal concerns and unrelated to the real legal world. 4 This essay attempts to overcome this polarization by exploring clinical legal education in a broader sense, emphasizing ways in which clinical methods and insights can be integrated into existing university legal education and describing benefits to be derived from such integration. Incorporating clinical legal education into Australian legal education can improve student learning of conventional legal doctrine and analysis by putting the limited materials used in legal education (appellate cases and statutes) into their dynamic context 5 and by making students more active participants in their own learning. 6 Including some elements of