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Supervision has been described as the "beating heart" and the "core" of clinical legal education. Yet lawyers who supervise law students in clinical programs have challenging and poorly understood roles within Canadian legal education. This article analyzes interviews with lawyers who supervise students in Canadian law-school affiliated legal clinics. Supervising lawyers describe the tensions between their roles as lawyers, supervisors and mentors, university and/or non-profit employees, social justice advocates, members of law societies, and clinic team members. These tensions often exist within an environment of lower pay, poor job security, substandard treatment by colleagues, inadequate training, and other aspects that paint a bleak picture. Despite these challenges, supervising lawyers describe intense satisfaction and inspiration derived from their work with students, clients, and the community. This article sheds light on the pedagogies employed by clinicians, their conditions of employment, and their roles in legal education more broadly. We conclude the article with our reflections about how law schools, clinics, and the legal profession can respond to the need to better support the vital work of supervision in clinical legal education.
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<p><span>Research in clinical law, critical legal studies, and therapeutic jurisprudence has spotlighted serious challenges that clients face whe
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The skill set required of lawyers is evolving, and the ability to creatively and expeditiously resolve client concerns through effective negotiation is increasingly important. In this chapter, we argue that negotiation competitions are an excellent method to nurture the knowledge, skills, attitudes, judgment, and values—or competencies—that are vital to law students’ success in legal practice. Such competencies include knowing key negotiation concepts; managing information and process; communicating and relationship-building; advocating for client interests in a problem-solving environment; being aware of and managing one’s own biases; internalizing ethical decision-making in negotiation, and engaging in reflective practice. These competencies are not the focus of certain other kinds of law student competitions, such as appellate and trial moots, which are designed to sharpen legal analysis and rights-based advocacy in an adversarial model. The Canadian National Negotiation Competition (CNNC) departs from that model. It gives law students the opportunity to engage in negotiations like those that lawyers experience in practice and to receive feedback from experts, in either English or French streams. It also invites students to wrestle with complex scenarios that feature both business and broader social policy tensions and objectives. In this chapter, the authors recount their experience with developing, running and growing the CNNC for nine years and highlight some of the key pedagogical lessons learned.
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This chapter considers the distinctive nature of clinical legal education in North America. Both the USA and Canada have rich heritages of influential and inspirational clinical legal education. Clinicians from the USA have been leaders in the development of clinical pedagogy and scholarship. The scale and strength of US CLE means that clinical faculty are better embedded in their law schools than in other countries. Canadian clinical programs developed in the 1970s and forged distinctive connections to community legal aid agencies. The future trajectory of Canadian clinics is unclear with changes afoot for legal education and the regulation of the legal profession.
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This short commentary examines the impacts of having "no numerical grades" during the Covid-19 pandemic. The author explores how this disruptive moment may open opportunities for competency-based assessment in legal education.
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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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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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