Clinical legal education in the United States provides practical experience for aspiring lawyers. Working under the supervision of law faculty as well as lawyers in the local community, students learn how to practice law and solve client problems. They interview clients and witnesses, analyze client problems, provide legal advice, research legal issues, and draft legal pleadings and documents, among other activities. In keeping with the pro bono expectations placed upon the U.S. legal fraternity, they often provide legal advice and access to the courts for those unable to pay for the services of a lawyer. The author outlines challenges for the development of clinical programs in other countries, but concludes, "Some form of clinical legal education is possible in every country wishing to involve law students in providing access to justice."

CLINICAL LEGAL education programs enable law students to provide legal assistance to persons and groups usually too poor to hire lawyers. Working under the supervision of law faculty, and sometimes other lawyers in their communities, law school clinic students learn how to practice law and solve client problems while providing access to the courts for those in need.

Leaders of bar associations, such as the American Bar Association (ABA), and judges in the United States have long supported clinical legal education because clinical programs play an important role in ensuring that access to the courts—a precondition for access to justice—will not be rationed to only those who can afford to hire lawyers. Bar leaders and judges also support clinical legal education because it is one of the most effective ways of teaching law students lawyering skills and the values of the legal profession.

Learning by Doing

Clinical legal education is experiential learning, or hands-on learning through experiences. Many educators believe that experiential learning is one of the most effective means of adult learning, and this is particularly true for learning most professions. Today, medical schools in every country include a large component of experiential learning in the form of medical laboratories, clinics, and internships. Architecture students also receive a component of hands-on learning. Thus, clinical legal education is much like the experiential learning components medical and architecture students take as part of their professional education.

In the United States, clinical legal education normally refers to those courses where students have direct client contact and confront the same problem situations lawyers face in practice. These courses are called live-client clinical courses because students work with clients rather than with hypothetical problems and situations as they may in a problem-based simulation skills course, such as moot court.

In-house clinical courses are the most dominant type of live-client clinical courses, and they involve a law school running clinical law offices inside or near the law school. Law students taking in-house clinical courses usually work under the direct supervision of law faculty who are also lawyers qualified to practice law. In an in-house clinical course, law students interview clients and witnesses to gather facts, analyze client problems and provide legal advice, perform legal research and draft legal pleadings and documents, conduct transactional work for clients, and perform most of the legal work on client cases.

In addition, student practice rules throughout the United States grant law students the limited license to practice law provided clinical faculty or lawyers supervise the students. Students certified under student practice rules also negotiate with lawyers for opposing parties and represent clients before courts, administrative agencies, and other tribunals. The student practice rules in almost every jurisdiction are designed to facilitate the twin goals of clinical legal education: (1) teaching students how to learn lawyering skills and professional values through real-life lawyering experiences, and (2) providing needed legal services to clients traditionally unable to afford legal counsel.

The second type of live-client clinical course is called an externship or field placement program because the students work in offices outside of the law school that are run by others. In these courses, law students work with lawyers in a variety of law offices and perform many of the same types of legal work as do students taking in-house clinical courses. A major difference between most in-house clinical programs and some externship programs is that fewer students in externship programs have limited licenses to practice law and therefore represent clients in court. Students in externships usually work in legal aid and public defender offices, prosecutors' offices, and other law offices providing services to the poor or representing the government. Some externships are with private law offices, and judicial externship programs provide students the opportunity to work as judicial clerks under the supervision of judges. Law faculty ensure that the lawyers and judges are providing quality supervision to law students working with them, and faculty usually have classes to discuss issues arising out of the externship practice experiences.

Placing students in the role of lawyers as much as possible is key to both in-house and externship clinical courses. Clinical teaching methodology focuses on students confronting client problems much like lawyers confront in practice, identifying and handling the client problems with supervision by faculty and sometimes other lawyers, and engaging in self-critique and critique by the supervising faculty or lawyers.

Every School Has One

Clinical legal education in the United States has existed for quite some time, but its real development occurred in the 1960s to 1990s. Proponents of clinical legal education from the earliest times have stressed the social dimension of law students providing legal assistance to those in need. Today, every law school has a clinical program, and most clinical programs consist of both in-house and externship clinical courses.

More than 15,000 law students, or approximately 35 percent of law graduates from ABA-approved law schools, currently take in-house clinical courses each year. In addition, nearly 15,000 law students participate in externships. Today in the United States, a modern law school education includes the opportunity for students to participate in clinical courses.

Clinical courses are also gaining in popularity throughout the world. Common in Canada and Australia for many years, clinical courses also are well-established in some law schools in Chile, Great Britain, India, the Netherlands, South Africa, and Sweden. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in clinical courses in countries such as Croatia, Romania, and Russia. Recent changes to the Japanese system of legal education that have gone in effect in 2004 are spurring several new graduate-level law schools to develop clinical courses.

Although the legal systems and cultures differ throughout the world, the movement toward clinical legal education continues to focus on integrating experiential learning into the study of law. In addition, in most countries clinical legal education contributes to providing access to justice for those traditionally underserved by lawyers.

A Significant Impact

The impact of clinical legal education in providing access to justice for those unable to afford lawyers has been significant in the United States. Thousands of law students taking in-house and externship clinical courses each year join the mere 5,000 to 6,000 lawyers working for organizations that represent the 45 million Americans who are so poor that they qualify for civil legal aid. In addition, other clinic law students help to provide criminal defense to those in need, and others in externships assist prosecutors and other government lawyers at the local, state, and federal levels.

In addition to providing access to the courts for clients and learning lawyering skills, law students also learn legal ethics rules and the norms of the legal profession first-hand in their clinical courses. Studies demonstrate that the first jobs of lawyers are critical to the development of professional responsibility, and clinical courses have the advantage of exposing law students to the pressures of law practice in an express learning environment. The involvement of law faculty in these courses assists law students in reflecting upon their ethical obligations to clients and the legal system.

Clinical legal education offers an advantage over experiences law students may receive as law clerks, in most apprentice programs, or as new lawyers. In most other settings, law clerks, apprentices, or new lawyers often receive very little guidance. Experience alone often is unstructured. In well-structured clinical courses, law faculty provide law students with the opportunity to confront ethical issues as lawyers and then discuss those issues. In this way, law students in clinical courses learn the norms of the legal profession.

Finally, most clinical courses serve an extremely important function by involving law students in the provision of pro bono legal services to those in need. In the United States, lawyers are expected to donate some of their time in providing legal services for free or at reduced rates for those too poor to hire lawyers. Although not every lawyer fulfills this expectation, a number do. Exposing law students to their obligation to provide pro bono representation may help to make this a part of their future practice as lawyers.

Four Challenges

Although clinical legal education is firmly established in the United States and some other countries, it is not a common part of legal education everywhere. There appear to be at least four challenges for the development of clinical programs in other countries.

First, in many countries only a small number of persons who study law plan to practice law. In these countries, law is not taught in a professional school; rather, it is an undergraduate major like history or political science, and a large number of the professors teaching law may not even be eligible to practice law. Unless special clinical courses are designed for students who want to become lawyers, clinical legal education is unlikely to be a viable method of instruction in these countries.

Second, some countries have established apprenticeship or clerking experiences that in theory are meant to provide the practical training for those who will become lawyers or judges. In these countries, many of which also treat law as an undergraduate discipline, clinical legal education courses may only become a viable component of the apprenticeship or clerking experience if the courses are designed to complement and not compete with the other practical training programs. Clinical courses in these countries can play an important role in providing access to justice for clients unable to afford lawyers, and they can be experiences prior to or after apprenticeships or clerking experiences.

Third, the cost of in-house clinical legal education courses may be too great for some countries. In the United States, this type of clinical legal education uses a very low student-to-faculty teaching ratio, and the courses are very time intensive for law faculty. The benefit of this type of legal education outweighs the costs in the United States, but that may not be true in all other countries. In some countries, externship programs involving faculty less intensively than in-house clinical courses may be more feasible. In these countries, clinical courses still can be structured so that students primarily work on cases handled by nongovernmental organizations and government-funded programs that provide legal assistance for those unable to hire lawyers. Law faculty can ensure quality control over the supervision that students receive from lawyers working in these offices, but do not have to have the direct responsibility for supervising the clinical students' work.

Finally, in many countries the legislatures or high courts would have to adopt laws or rules to permit students in clinical legal education courses to perform the work of lawyers. Even if students are not given the limited license to practice law, clinical courses designed so that students may do as much of the work as possible under existing laws and rules will be a huge step forward in these countries. Thus, the absence of a law or rule to grant a limited license to practice law need not prevent the development of clinical programs.

None of these obstacles is insurmountable. Some form of clinical legal education is possible in every country wishing to involve law students in providing access to justice. In addition to fulfilling that objective, clinical programs will better prepare students for the ethical practice of law.

Peter A. Joy is a professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis School of Law, St. Louis, Missouri, where he directs the Criminal Justice Clinic and also teaches classes in legal ethics and trial practice. He is past president of the Clinical Legal Education Association (CLEA), a membership organization of more than 700 law professors teaching clinical courses in the United States, and a former chair of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Section on Clinical Legal Education. He is the author of several law review articles on clinical legal education and legal ethics.

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.