Clinical legal education (CLE) is potentially the major disruptor of traditional law schools’ core functions. Good CLE challenges many central clichés of conventional learning in law—everything from case book method to the 50-minute lecture. And it can challenge a contemporary overemphasis on screen-based learning, particularly when those screens only provide information and require no interaction. Australian Clinical Legal Education comes out of a thorough research program and offers the essential guidebook for anyone seeking to design and redesign accountable legal education; that is, education that does not just transform the learner, but also inculcates in future lawyers a compassion for and service of those whom the law ought to serve. Established law teachers will come to grips with the power of clinical method. Law students struggling with overly dry conceptual content will experience the connections between skills, the law and real life. Regulators will look again at law curricula and ask law deans ‘when’?

The Future of Australian Legal Education Conference was held in August 2017 to mark the 10th anniversary of the Australian Academy of Law (AAL), the 90th anniversary of the Australian Law Journal (ALJ) and the 30th anniversary of the Pearce Report on Australian Law Schools. The conference provided a forum for an informed, national discussion on the future of legal study and practice in Australia, covering practitioners, academics, judges and students.

Clinical Legal Education (CLE) can be defined in broad terms as the study of law through real, or simulated, casework. It enables students to experience the law in action and to reflect on those experiences. CLE offers an alternative learning experience to the traditional lecture/seminar method and allows participants to take the study of law beyond the lecture theatre and library. CLE has been a part of English law schools for several decades and is becoming an increasingly popular component of a number of programmes. It is also well established in North America, Australia and many other countries around the globe. In some law schools, CLE is credit-bearing; in others, it is an extracurricular activity. Some CLE schemes focus on social-welfare law, whilst others are commercially orientated. A number are run in conjunction with third-sector organisations and many are supported by private practice law firms. This edited collection brings together academics, lawyers, third-sector organisations and students to discuss the present experience and potential of CLE. As such, it will be of interest to a wide and diverse audience, both within and outside the UK.

Clinical legal education is playing an increasingly important role in educating lawyers worldwide. In The Global Clinical Movement: Educating Lawyers for Social Justice, editor Frank S. Bloch and contributors describe the central concepts, goals, and methods of clinical legal education from a global perspective, with a particular emphasis on its social justice mission. With chapters written by leading clinical legal educators from every region of the world, The Global Clinical Movement demonstrates how the emerging global clinical movement can advance social justice through legal education. Professor Bloch and the contributors also examine the influence of clinical legal education on the legal academy and the legal profession and chart the global clinical movement's future role in educating lawyers for social justice. The Global Clinical Movement consists of three parts. Part I describes clinical legal education programs from every region of the world and discusses those qualities that are unique to a particular country or region. Part II discusses the various ways that clinical programs and the clinical methodology advance the cause of social justice around the world. Part III analyzes the current state of the global clinical movement and sets out an agenda for the movement to advance social justice through socially relevant legal education.

Clinical legal education is of increasing significance to law schools in Australia and across the globe. The potential to combine community service with student learning distinguishes clinical teaching from other forms of legal education. This book considers how to best recognise and realise the contributions that experiential learning methodologies can make to legal education. It identifies the contributions that clinical programs can make to student learning, social justice, community engagement and research. In this book, Jeff Giddings provides a framework for understanding both the pedagogical and political dimensions of the establishment and sustainability of clinical programs. He uses in-depth historical case studies of major Australian clinical programs to identify how various interested groups can harness the great potential of clinical legal education.

Globally, the methodologies of legal education have not changed in any fundamental way, some methods dating back hundreds of years. Law schools have relied, for too long, on passive learning methods such as lectures or cases. Clinical legal education provides an alternative that is more than just another pedagogical method. It provides a way for students to experience their emerging professional selves, while providing services or projects with poor and underrepresented clients. This book documents both the historical origins of clinical experiments in the earliest days of US university legal education, and the now-global reach of clinical pedagogy as a proven tool for effective training of legal professionals.

Teaching Legal Education in the Digital Age explores how legal pedagogy and curriculum design should be modernised to ensure that law students have a realistic view of the future of the legal profession. Using future readiness and digital empowerment as central themes, chapters discuss the use of technology to enhance the design and delivery of the curriculum and argue the need for the curriculum to be developed to prepare students for the use of technology in the workplace. The volume draws together a range of contributions to consider the impact of digital pedagogies in legal education and propose how technology can be used in the law curriculum to enhance student learning in law schools and lead excellence in teaching. Throughout, the authors consider what it means to be future-ready and what we can do as law academics to facilitate the knowledge, skills and dispositions needed by future-ready graduates. Part of Routledge’s series on Legal Pedagogy, this book will be of great interest to academics, post-graduate students, teachers and researchers of law, as well as those with a wider interest in legal pedagogy or legal practice.

This edited book addresses contemporary challenges in clinical legal education (CLE), considering its role in legal education and in the broader community it serves. Written by experts from various international contexts, the book explores how the changing nature and requirements of legal practice alongside social and technological developments affect the pedagogy of clinical legal education. Chapters chart the development of clinical legal education across various jurisdictions and examine developments in programme design and supervision of and in CLE along with the role of CLE in the community. The authors also reflect on the dynamic and developing role of clinical legal education and offer recommendations for the future. This book will be essential reading for academics, researchers in clinical legal education, and those interested in legal education across the world. It will also be of interest to students of clinical legal education whose research requires a deeper understanding of the current themes and issues of the subject.

Thinking About Clinical Legal Education provides a range of philosophical and theoretical frameworks that can serve to enrich the teaching and practice of Clinical Legal Education (CLE). CLE has become an increasingly common feature of the curriculum in law schools across the globe. However, there has been relatively little attention paid to the theoretical and philosophical dimensions of this approach. This edited collection seeks to address this gap by bringing together contributions from the clinical community, to analyse their CLE practice using the framework of a clearly articulated philosophical or theoretical approach. Contributions include insights from a range of jurisdictions including: Brazil, Canada, Croatia, Ethiopia, Israel, Spain, UK and the US. This book will be of interest to CLE academics and clinic supervisors, practitioners, and students.

Recent years have seen social justice emerge as a powerful driver for work, both in law schools and the legal services sector. However, questions remain about how that term is understood and given meaning within the legal academy and beyond. This edited collection explores the meanings that have emerged and might subsequently be developed, together with a practical exploration of projects that have sought to bring the social justice agenda to life in law schools and in communities around the world. Over the course of eighteen chapters, this volume engages with a range of social justice and legal education themes, including clinical legal education, innocence projects, access to justice, cause lawyering, LGBTQ identities, and sustainability in law schools. In addition, it also explores themes of ethics and values in contemporary legal education in Africa, Australia, North America, and the UK.