Author Description

"There is a global revolution taking place within university legal education. It is taking place on many fronts, particularly since the dawning of the twenty-first century. The focus of this book is that ongoing and growing revolution, and it is assaulting the deepest traditions of the legal academy. The rapid global spread of clinical legal education, as a non-traditional method of instruction and as a guide to and context for socially conscious lawyering, is changing and improving the role of law schools in the preparation of students for law practice. Clinical education, as the name implies, involves law students in learning law by guided practice during law school. Ideally, that setting involves real cases, clients or other project-based work with client communities, usually with the poor or other marginalized populations without other access to counsel. Clinical education, intensely learning-focused, is challenging the dominant traditions of teacher-centric legal education: the case method, largely taught using case-books in the United States, and the lecture, still used almost exclusively in Europe and other traditional law schools throughout the world. Clinical education does not seek to overthrow that tradition, but to offer an alternative, additional route to learning, grounded in modern ideas of cognitive science and adult learning. In fact, clinical legal education is more than a method -it is pathway toward personal and professional identity for students, manifesting itself in each student's distinctly personal experience, and it is a model, not only for all professional lawyering, but particularly for one of conscience in the service of individuals, groups or populations otherwise without equal access to law or lawyers."--