Influential articles on the evolution of clinical legal education over the past three decades, by members of the founding generation of clinical law professors.

European legal teaching - historically formalistic, doctrinal, hierarchical, and passive - is coming under increasing pressure to reimagine itself as pragmatic, policy-aware, and action-oriented. Out of this context, a bottom-up movement of university law clinics appears to be emerging in Europe. Although intellectually indebted to the US model, the European variant reflects legal education and practice in Europe, specifically the multi-layered and multi-genetic legal landscape resulting from the Europeanization and internationalization of national legal systems, the globalization of European legal markets, and the growing demand for civic engagement in view of increasingly powerful supra-national institutions. Through the prism of clinical legal education, Reinventing Legal Education is the first attempt to gather scholarly and systematic reflections on the developments taking place in European legal teaching and practice. This groundbreaking book should be read by anyone interested in how clinical legal education is reinventing legal education in Europe.

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’?

This study explored what role reflective practice has in Nigerian clinical law programmes, and aimed to understand how the concept is used in teaching and learning in law clinic practice and social justice work. The theoretical concept of reflective practice in clinical legal education is still an emerging concept in legal education, with suggestions for an integrative and expansive framework (Leering, 2014; Lowenberger, 2019; Madhloom, 2019; Seear et al., 2019; Spencer & Brooks, 2019). The theoretical framework of this study is positioned within experiential and transformative learning that recognised collective, relational, and contextual learning; and the concept that reflective practice should be an integrative process inclusive of cognitive and emotional processes. The methodological framework used a qualitative case study situated within a constructivist paradigm that incorporated contextual background of law clinics in Nigeria and the complexities law clinics face in dealing with their intervention in social justice issues. Data collection was through in-depth semi-structured interviews with open-ended questions. I interviewed six participants comprised of clinical law teachers selected through purposeful sampling, and data analysis was a comparative process moving from inductive to deductive processes by identifying meaningful and relevant themes (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). Findings indicated that in clinical legal education in Nigeria, reflective practice was identified as an integral aspect without which teaching would revert to the traditional theoretical approach. I found five major themes through which participants integrated reflective practice, and they include, a) reflective practice was integrated in classroom learning processes through various feedback tools; b) reflections occurred during out-of-classroom experiential learning at different stages of law clinic practice cycle and community outreaches; c) reflection supported learning and helped to address issues brought forward as a result of emotions triggered during law clinic activities; d) participants connected their practice to theory and provided a framing of reflective practice which had not existed prior to this study; and e) reflective practice was fundamental in assessing the impact of clinical legal education on students and teachers - in the development of professional skills and social values, and communities - in addressing legal needs. Teaching clinically was seen as reflective teaching which holistically integrated critical reflection, reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action, and created space for the role of emotions and relational learning in legal practice. Law clinic practice evoked deep emotions for students when exposed to societal harms and the criminal justice system. The study however, indicated that reflective practice was implicitly an integral part of clinical legal education that needed to be made more explicit through increased documentation of processes, to promote transferability of knowledge and practice in legal education. The study provided a theoretical guide in framing and supporting a framework for an expansive concept of reflective practice for clinical legal education and for the legal profession.

Clinical legal education has revolutionized legal education, from its deepest origins in the nineteenth century to its now-global reach.