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Over the past several years, the regulation and accreditation of legal education in most common law jurisdictions is shifting significantly, with greater emphasis on ‘outcomes’ or ‘outputs’. In Canada, the Federation of Law Societies of Canada is entering more boldly into the approval and accreditation of law schools. In Australia, legal regulators are increasingly nationalizing their approach to legal education, and developing new ‘threshold learning outcomes’ for law schools. In the United States, the American Bar Association is shifting to a more outcomes-focused regulatory regime. The result of these accreditation processes is not entirely clear: however, most jurisdictions have set out their respective approaches in later-stage draft form, allowing an initial comparative view. While debate on regulation, accreditation and assessment in all three countries has been vigorous, a notable gap exists in discourse around the role of clinical legal education, particularly in Canada and Australia. This article then explores how clinical education fits either explicitly or implicitly in these accreditation schemes, focusing on the strengths and weaknesses of competency/outcome regulation from a clinical legal education perspective. Although there is potential for clinical legal education to be used as a ‘competency boot camp’, weakening the reflective, deep and integrative assessment approach that is the cornerstone of mature, ‘third wave’ clinical legal education, there is also potential for greater commitment to integration of clinical legal education into the law school curriculum more generally. This article then sets out the importance of curricular integration and self-assessment to realize the full potential of not only clinical legal education, but the aspirational vision of lawyering many hope to achieve.
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English Abstract: Clinical work in law offers important opportunities for students to learn critical, reflective and politicized approaches to legal identity and practice. Such an approach is most meaningful when it is engaged by supervising lawyers and social workers in a clinical placement. The authors of this article, the Academic Clinic Director and Executive Director of two Windsor-based clinic programs, offer context, perspective and examples of how critical pedagogy (influenced by, but distinct from, critical legal studies) provides a roadmap for supervising lawyers and the programs in which they work. The paper briefly sets the context of the authors' teaching and practice. The authors then set out some of the interested parties in clinical legal education, including law schools, communities, students and clients. The paper concludes with ideas on how a clinical program might set out to strengthen critical pedagogy in the supervisory relationship.
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What are some of the challenges and possibilities animating modern Canadian clinical and experiential learning in law? This question was the starting point for our research, which examined two sets of data. In the first part of this project, we analyzed available information on existing clinical and experiential learning programs in Canadian law schools. This data revealed a growing quantity and variety of programs across the country. We then held qualitative interviews with deans, professors, and clinicians across Canada regarding their views of clinical and experiential learning. While the interviews suggested that many of the same financial and curricular challenges that dominated early debates remain stubbornly entrenched, there are also significant promising views and practices. No longer regarded by most as a legal education outlier, clinical and experiential learning has come out of the curricular shadows and taken a prominent place in most law schools in Canada. Nuanced questions now dominate thinking around this generation of clinical and experiential learning. What is the role of community in the creation, decision making, and continuity of clinical programs? How can students balance an increasingly intensive set of learning, professional, and financial challenges? How can clinical and experiential learning be better aligned with the rest of the curriculum, and as accessible as possible? As all respondent law schools but one are expanding their clinical and experiential learning options, these and other questions will continue to animate programs in the foreseeable future.
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Clinical Law: Practice, Theory, and Social Justice Advocacy is the first Canadian text of its kind to integrate the theories of clinical law and provide a set of practical tools to teach students how to effectively advocate for their clients in a legal clinic environment. This hands-on guide puts individual client advocacy at its centre with information on how to interview and counsel clients and how to manage a client file. Clinical Law is ideal for clinical law courses. The text features discussion questions, notes, and exercises to provide students with accessible information, including the varying contexts in which clinical law is practised, the practical approaches to building relationships with clients and communities, and the future of clinical legal practice.
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This study analyses interviews with frontline service workers employed in agencies in Windsor, Ontario, Canada who work with persons without immigration status. Through these interviews, frontline service workers provided insights into their work with persons without status, including the significant barriers to effective service provision requiring 'covert practices' as part of their work. The interview subjects ultimately conclude that an access without fear (AWF) policy would indeed bolster their efforts to work with persons without status, buttressing claims that an AWF policy can be a useful tool to support the basic needs of persons without status. However, the interviews also raise questions about how the law is understood by frontline service workers and the very real potential that AWF might be yet another unmet promise. Underlying these interviews were also questions of trust and relationship-building that re-emphasise both the need and limitations of policy.
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Integrating curricular and co-curricular endeavors to enhance student outcomes reports on a variety of innovative approaches taken in universities in a number of nations of their experience in bringing together learning in courses with learning in co- and extracurricular activities. Topics range from study abroad programs to service-learning. Also covered are community-based learning, cross-disciplinary collaborations, and peer-mentoring. This volume will introduce you to research and many interesting contexts, such as the U.S. Naval Academy, where promoting ethical leadership to cadets has been an important focus. Frame-breaking approaches, such as having university business students and circus performers collaborate, are explained within the context of the literature. The leveraging of Somali immigrant education programs for student learning is a stimulating activity that is also covered. Another inventive issue explored is the reformatting of traditional co-curricular transcripts to reflect a wider indication and measure of students' skills and abilities
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