Global Agendas, Cultural Capital and Self-Assessment of Clinical Legal Education Programs

Abstract

Modern clinical legal education programs are rich in their diversity and ambition, so much so that it is often difficult to decide if a self-described clinical program meets the description of 'clinic' or is in reality something less than that, seeking to achieve academic acceptance without investing in faculty understanding of clinical pedagogy or the money needed to provide reasonable personnel and physical infrastructure. In most countries, there has been little effort to establish standards for clinical legal education through accreditation bodies. Given the dearth of national direction, most law school deans simply decide to let the description and definition issue remain obscure. They do so for many reasons: because national legal education system bureaucrats imperfectly understand or recognise clinical methods; because students' consistent requests for more experiential legal education are muted and respectful; because traditionally-educated legal academics are wary of bringing practice-related content into their doctrinal classes; because doctrinal content is relatively cheap to teach compared to clinical methods; and finally, because finding a definition for 'clinic' and then acting on it is not required in any international accreditation context and rarely in a national context.