‘You’re such a friendly group of people!’ Reflections on the 7th Australian Clinical Legal Education Conference

From July 9 to 11 2003, clinical legal education teachers and supporters from around the globe gathered at Caloundra on the Sunshine Coast of Queensland for the 7th Australian Clinical Legal Education Conference. The Law School of Griffith University hosted the conference. While the objectivity of this conference report is open to question (I was the principal organiser), the program worked very well. Almost without exception, participants commented on the friendly nature of the group and the value of the sessions they attended

Why No Clinic Is an Island: The Merits and Challenges of Integrating Clinical Insights Across the Law Curriculum

In this Essay, Giddings presents a case study of the attempts to integrate clinical legal education throughout the curriculum in Australia. This study is both comprehensive and instructive. It illustrates familiar challenges to teaching a broad range of professionalism and lessons regarding justice while bringing real life problems and clients into the academy. It is also instructive regarding successful and unsustainable strategies. One of the main contributions of this Article is its objectivity. Giddings notes that much of the clinical pedagogical scholarship is about the authors’ own programs and lacks a certain sense of distance and skepticism. He thus provides a more detached and comparative perspective. In addition, Giddings studies the actual implementation of integration rather than the plans for such programs. Beside these methodological benefits, Giddings’ central contribution is his synthesis of the ingredients of successful integration of clinical pedagogy into the curriculum: sequencing, integration of clinical faculty into the courses, complementarities between clinic and podium courses. For Giddings, the benefits of integration inure to the students who learn reflection in action and to the clinic faculty who become more enmeshed in and central to the academy. Barriers include the difficulties in achieving economies of scale and of managing expectations. In other words, successful integration may demand more resources than the institution can sustain and may demand more of the clinical professors, who must be, in addition to teaching, of both the worlds of practice and research, while non-clinic colleagues need be engaged in teaching and scholarship, but not practice. This Article provides a road map toward integration into the classroom of professional values, the notion of actual human beings, and real problems of justice

Clinical Legal Education in Australia: A Historical Perspective

The article focuses on real client clinical work with participating students being supervised by lawyer academics while also referring to other models. This model has enabled clinics to retain a strong commitment to community service whilst also facilitating close work with small groups of students

The Tyranny of Distance: Clinical Legal Education in ‘The Bush’

This paper analyses the challenges faced by clients, students and teachers involved in a clinical program which uses new technology to deliver legal services in remote areas of Southern Queensland, Australia. A range of novel issues were addressed by Griffith University Law School, Learning Network Queensland and Caxton Legal Centre in their partnership development and delivery of this clinical program which involves the use of audio-graphics conferencing to enable students to provide legal advice and assistance to people hundreds of kilometres away. The ‘Advanced Family Law-Clinic’ program commenced in July 1999 with financial support from the Federal Attorney-General’s Department. The paper considers the range of issues which arose in development of the program

Lessons Learned from Remote Delivery: Supervision and the Student Experience

This article considers the effect of the shift to virtual delivery of clinical legal education (CLE) that was necessitated by the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on students and the lessons learned from students’ perspectives, especially regarding supervision, for clinical best practice going forward. Much of the recent scholarship on the effects of the pandemic has focused on the clients of clinical programs and the challenges of responding to heightened client service needs at a time of economic dislocation and widespread movement restrictions. This was a particular issue in the city of Melbourne, Australia, where residents faced some of the longest and most onerous lockdowns in the world. This article focuses on students of clinical programs and the role of supervision practices in facilitating students’ learning during this challenging period

Risks and Rewards of Externships: Exploring Goals and Methods

This article explored the risks and rewards of designing and teaching in an externship program, the goals one might have, and the methods one might use. We have argued that it is important to pay attention to the principles of intentional design when developing an externship program. In particular, we have identified and challenged the assumption that skills development must be the predominant goal for externships. This is a common assumption on the part of legal education regulators in our respective home countries, the USA and Australia, as well as in England and Wales. Skills development can, but does not have to, be a focus for every externship. If it is to be a focus, the targeted skills should be articulated as clearly and specifically as possible. Students must learn the theory and methods behind the skills to be used in the placement, either through appropriate pre-requisites, a skills-focused classroom component, or a clear understanding that the placement supervisor will be able to impart both the relevant theory and methods. Then the reflection component also must be designed to enhance students’ acquisition of the identified skills. We have explored how this can be done with either the “tailor-made” or the “retail” externship structure. However, we believe the regulatory focus on skills has obscured the important values that can be acquired through a well-designed and well-taught externship

Risks and Rewards of Externships: Exploring Goals and Methods

This article grew from a presentation relating externship clinical programs to the theme of the July 2016 International Journal of Clinical Legal Education and Association of Canadian Legal Education conference: The Risks and Rewards of Clinical Legal Education Programmes. Externships or field placement programs involve students placed away from the law school and supervised by a person who is not employed by the law school. Externships offer many potential rewards for students as well as other stakeholders, including especially community institutions. But there are also risks—risks that the externship will be expected to accomplish too much with too few resources or that the externship program will be held back in the potential for contribution due to inadequate imagination or planning. This article seeks to encourage externship teachers to put aside assumptions that are sometimes made about how externship programs “should be” and consider some alternative approaches to course design and possible goals for externship courses

Self-advocates in civil legal disputes: how personal and other factors influence the handling of their cases

This article examines how some self-advocates handle their own civil legal disputes in circumstances where legal representation is not available. A combination of influences helps explain why some users of a specialised dispute resolution process were more likely to be effective and successful in their self-advocacy endeavours. Most importantly, the more effective users displayed positive attitudes, motivation and self-belief. They also demonstrated abilities in organisation, research and preparation. These attributes appeared to position them strongly to engage with and effectively manage the legal matters at hand. By contrast, other users in the same study were negatively disposed towards the challenges they faced. They lacked confidence and avoided seeking advice, conducting research, or preparing for their hearing