What is clinical legal education?

Clinical legal education is the legal name used to refer to the delivery of legal services by law
students under professional suspension though there is no defined definition.

Services offered are probono.1

The word clinic originates from the French word “Clinique” which means besides hence those
are places where people receive legal services.

It’s not a straight forward word as expected by people but it’s a metaphor. Its like a baazar open
to all people who prefer to both enhance legal services, education and seek access to improve
access to justice for the wider public.

Characteristics of all services delivered.

Delivery of legal services.

 Participation of law students achieving under professional supervision where necessary.

A clinical legal education means any clinic activity accredited or extra curricular where each
student takes responsibility in law related work for clients hand in hand with a supervisor.

Students receive feedback and learn from their experiences through interactions with clients,
colleagues and supervisors and also the ethical dilemmas of issues arising and impact of the law.

A university clinic involving real clients, involving provision of legal information, advise or
representation to clients on individual basis.

History of Clinical Legal Education.

1
Free legal services.
“Most of our fellow citizens are poor. They are without proper housing, health care and schools. Many
are without jobs. Even those who have them earn too little to support themselves and their families.
Poverty is inimical to democracy… There is no shame in admitting there is poverty, and unjust
distribution of wealth and the granting of honors amongst us. The real shame is and will continue to be
our failure to take steps to put an end to both poverty and substantial inequality” 2.

Clinical legal education developed in the United States as an explicit social justice agenda and primarily
in response to a lack of legal services for the poor. The term Clinical Legal Education was coined by
Jerome Frank first when he asked “Why Not a Clinical Lawyer School.” However, it was not until the New
York City based Council on Legal Education for Professional Responsibility, funded by the Ford
Foundation, took up the role in promoting and supporting law school-based experimentation in the
1970s and 1980s. Initially, common law lawyers learned their craft from one another, through various
forms of apprenticeship, frequently supported by reading, studying and learning law from books,
principals or masters and, in some cases, informal and formal lectures or tutorials. When it did develop,
it did not focus on legal practice in behavioral or systemic terms, but rather on an exposition of the law
in its assigned fields. In its early days, the study of lawyers’ professional work was largely procedural and
frequently mechanical and technical in overall approach. American legal education had given up the
apprenticeship slowly but steadily, and in its place grew academic law programs in the universities.
Christopher Columbus Lang dell, the first dean at Harvard law school, sought to make law a respectable
science alongside the other disciplines of the nineteenth century and took law, predictably, on a largely
analytical positivist path by suggesting extensive training.

In the United States where clinical education was first introduced, it was associated with the medical
school and involved the actual practice of the profession by students employing their skills on actual or
real patients. The advantages of this system of education was acknowledged and eventually adopted by
law schools in the late 19th Century to suit the needs of law students and was further employed to cater
for the expanding needs for legal aid to indigent persons. The result was the emergence of a system of
clinical legal education which not only served the educational needs of law students in terms of skills or
practical training but also served the social needs of indigent persons in terms of providing legal services
through legal aid clinics run by law schools. The fundamental basis upon which law schools in the United
States introduced clinical legal education was that in preparation for legal practice, classroom lectures
were insufficient in providing practical skills without exposing the students to clinics where practical
professional skills were acquired.

In the 1960s, a period when the process of decolonization was sweeping throughout Africa, the
community along with the newly independent governments, enlightened by the new demands of
independence, began to question the role of universities and their respective departments in the
process of social transformation. Law schools in Africa also subsequently acknowledged this fact by
introducing clinical programs as part of their system of legal education. Instrumental in this process
were Professors like Gower L C B, Twining W L, Paul, C N J and others who, during the 1960s,
spearheaded and drove the process of implementing those programs in Western Africa (Ghana, Nigeria),
Eastern Africa (Uganda, Kenya) and Southern Africa (the BOLESWA countries of Botswana, Lesotho and
Swaziland). In South Africa, at the time of the first international conference on legal aid held at the

2
Bizos, G: “Our failure to end poverty is the real shame of the Nation”. In Sunday Times (South Africa) of May 30,
1999 p.20
University of Natal, Durban in July 1983, there were only two university legal aid clinics in the country 3.
Today universities in Africa are assigned their respective functions by the relevant statutes establishing
them. What is more is that those legal functions have been supplemented by broader commitments to
the service of the community as evidenced by different mission statements on the issue. Law school
outreach programs to the wider community geared towards alleviation and eradication of poverty and
ignorance are, therefore, undertaken within the broader framework of respective university outreach
activities.

Clinical legal education programs are more comprehensive in Uganda. There is involvement of a variety
of organizations including FIDAUganda in implementing programs of access to justice, but issues of
clinical legal education are more prominently associated with Uganda’s Law Development Centre, an
institution charged, amongst others, with the legal duty of providing legal aid and advice to indigent
litigants4. The basis for this is a report by Professor Gower which recommended as follows: “One
valuable method of instruction, and at the same time a valuable social service, and one obviously
needed in Uganda, is the running of a legal aid clinic in connection with the (bar) course… At this clinic,
the student under the watchful eye of a qualified supervisor, would interview, advise indigent litigants
and, ideally, carry out any necessary correspondence and negotiations on their behalf 5”.What resulted
from this recommendation was the establishment of the Centre with the function of organizing and
conducting courses of instruction for the acquisition of legal knowledge, professional skills and
experience by persons intending to practice as attorneys. While noting the importance of this function
as the basis for introduction of clinical programs in Uganda, it is also important to note that it was the
Centre and not the Law School at Makerere which was vested with that responsibility, the reason being
the acknowledgment by the then government of the distinction between the academic or intellectual
legal education at the University and the professional or practical skills training at the Centre as an
independent vocational training institute. The Law Development Centre Act of 1970 was meant to effect
this separation.

In discharging its statutory obligation with particular reference to clinical legal education, the Centre’s
mission is “to enhance the professional training of post graduate law students at the Centre and
promote the lawyer’s role of service to the community through practical experience based on learning
and legal representation of needy persons6”. To that end two activities currently exist in pursuit of its
clinical legal education programme; ensuring that postgraduate law students at the Centre acquire
practical training through real situation cases so that they can, under supervision, interview indigent
litigants, advise them, carry out any necessary correspondence and negotiations on their behalf and
hopefully represent them in courts (Magistrates’ Courts only); as well as ensuring the education of the
general public with regard to their legal rights and duties. Due to logistical problems the above activities
were set in motion only in 1998 through the generous donations of the American Bar Association and
the United States Information Service. There is nothing that suggests that student participation in these
programs is compulsory and for credit, but one can understand the fact that since the activities are still
3
McQuoid-Mason, D J: “Teaching Social Justice to Law Students through Community Service – The South African
Experience” in Transforming South African Universities 1999 Alice p.76
4
Section 2 (1) (e) of the Law Development Centre Act, 1970.
5
Paragraphs 64-5 of Sessional Paper No.3 of 1969 on Government Memorandum on the Report of a Committee
Appointed to Study and Make Recommendations Concerning Legal Education 1969 Government Printer, Entebbe,
Uganda.
6
The Legal Aid Clinic 1999 (Flyer) Publication of the Centre p2.
at a slightly less expanded stage, more will have to be done to ensure effective student participation if
the noble objectives are to be realized.

Components of clinical legal education.

The legal clinic concept was first discussed at the turn of the 20 th century by two professors
as a variant of the medical clinic. The Russian professor Alexander I Lyublinsky(1901) is one of
those who wrote an article in a German journal. Below are the five components of Clinical Legal
Education (CLE) or rather how CLE is done.
-The clinic is part of the law school curriculum and it offers academic credit for student
participation in handling cases or projects as well as in a seminar that is taught either before or
during the handling of cases or projects.
-The students work on actual cases or projects to permit the widest practical scope of the
practice of law, and with the goal to expand student practice that local conditions permit.
-The clients of the clinic are generally those who cannot otherwise gain access to legal
representation, either due to their poverty their social marginalization or the unique or complex
nature of their claims.
-Representation by students is closely supervised by an experienced attorney admitted to
practice in the relevant jurisdiction where they appear preferably a teacher with full or part time
status in the law school.
-Work on real cases as accompanied by a course in the law school, taught with experimental
methods such as simulation role plays and games work train students in the skills, values and
ethics of law practice.7
Types of legal clinic.
 Simulation clinic.
Students can learn from variety of simulation of what happens in legal practice. For example,
moot court, client interviewing exercises, negotiation exercises.
 The in-house real client clinics.
The clinics is based in the law school. It is offered, monitored and controlled in law school. Here
the clients require actual solutions to their actual problems. Clients are also interviewed and
advised orally or in writing and also helped with the preparation of their cases.
 The out-house clinics.

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Role of lawyers and jurists in establishment and functioning of clinics , Jonahshiny
It is a clinic that involves students in exercising legal work outside the college or university.
These types of clinic may operate on the basis of advice giving only. Such agencies are run by
trade union councils and other non- statutory bodies.
Objectives.
Clinical Legal Education majorly has majorly two goals that set a base for all the other
objectives. These are to teach practical skills and professional responsibility to laws students by
having them generally represent clients. The rest of the objectives stem from these two because
this is a subject based on practicing and applying the knowledge acquired from learning the law.
These objectives are;
-To provide opportunities for students to assume the professional role of a practicing attorney.
-To enhance student’s professional skills through participation in activities such as
interviewing and counselling clients, analysing client problems, providing legal advice,
researching legal issues and drafting legal pleadings and documents among other actives.
-To expose students to issues of professional responsibility within the context of legal
practice.
-To foster understanding of and commitment to high standards of professional responsibility
to clients, the justice system, and the community through the examination of ethical and
professional dilemmas that arise in daily law practice.
-To give law students a deeper and more meaningful understanding of legal profession and
the lawyering process.
Importances.
-In Clinical Legal Education, students get opportunity of working with real clients and face
real problems of professional life. Students are provided with a meaningful, social justice
oriented education that presents them with real life problems in a hope to achieve a fair and just
society.
-Clinical Legal Education provides an experimental knowledge to the students and give them
understanding of social context in which the law operates. For example looking the wider
concept of rule of law thus improving access to justice. Through this exercise students can help
people facing human rights abuses and inequality. In the same vain, provides education for the
community on their human rights thereby eradicating the levels of ignorance8
-When it comes to social justice, clinical legal education has bridged the gap between the rich
and the poor by providing proper legal services to the poor at no cost. This is through the
probono services.

8
Professor Jullie price Head of Probono and clinical legal education Cardiff university school of law and politics
 -Clinical legal education has impacted the remarkable growth of bodies carrying out legal
services. Individuals concerned with various forms of injustices have been a driving force in the
establishment of organisations providing legal services.
Solutions to Problems Facing Clinical legal education.
Advocate for time for practical legal education. This involves championing for time tables in law
schools through faculty boards that involve students out reaches on practical legal education. A
case in point is Gulu university school of law where there is still need to have room for students
to have practical skills. For example, during the recent public lecture on the Joan Kagezi, Hon.
Justice Flavia expressed her concern over Ugandan law schools that focus more of the theory
than the practical bit of it.
Increase in budget financing for faculties to have legal practical education. This is still a
challenge especially in Gulu university where even finamcing moot courts is a big challenge.
There has been less financing to the faculty which needs to be revised by management of the
university to allow facilitation of the practical legal education. There is currently a shortage of
finances especially having students who represent students for the CEHURD moots are not
facilitated by the university. Currently at the faculty we have a project initiated by the students
called “Gulu University Clinic” which is relactant but needs to bed facilitated.
Advocating for all students inclusion in participating in legal practical education. In most cases,
the method of selecting students to go for practixalm legal education is premised on students
with the higher CPGAs for example, In Makerere University, for one to go for PLAC should
have a CGPA of 3.0 and above which leaves most of the students who cant meet the requirement
abandoned without a say.9
Advocating for students representation in court. Currently, the procedure of becoming an
advocate is totally long which has not
Allocation of funds by the ministry of finance for more lecturers.

Challenges facing teaching of CLE in Uganda.

9
Linden Thomas and Nick Johnson, clinical legal education handbook.
In Pius Niwagaba v LDC10 Justice Okumu Wengi citing The World Bank Funded Report on
Legal and Education Training (J Odoki) observed that the training of a lawyer takes three stages;
(i) The Academic stage (ii) Professional which consists of institutional training (iii) Continuing
legal education. The academic stage should be taken at university or its equivalent; the
professional stage should consist partly of organized vocational studies in an institutional setting
partly of practical experience in a professional setting under supervision. Laws that govern legal
education in Uganda include; The Advocates Act Cap 267, The Advocates (Professional
Requirements for Admission to Post-Graduate Bar Course) (Amendment) Notice, 2007 as
amended by Legal Notice No.12 of 2010(though pre-entry exams were struck off at LDC).
Criticism that law schools do not offer sufficient practical training can be traced back to the
1930s with philosophers like Jerome Frank referring to it as; ‘mere teaching of library law which
produces law graduates competent in abstract reasoning but no practical lawyering skills. It
ignores the most valued qualities; oral and written communication, confidence, drafting
documents, legal analysis, and reasoning in practice, planning and solving legal problems over
simplified teaching of law’11
The course is too demanding to enable students make proper analyses of the issues they are faced
with. Besides working on various projects all at the same time, students also have weekly
assignments. The effect of this all is that students work just to beat the set deadlines but not to
really analyse issues. This was reflected in Ms. Atim’s comments in the retreat when she said
that students play games and show unseriousness into their essays.
CLE is only available to a few students. The first requirement for a student to be eligible to apply
for CLE in Makerere University is that he/she must have a minimum CGPA of 3.2. Although this
was reduced to 3.0 to encourage more applicants, this requirement denies committed students to
understanding social justice an opportunity. This seems to be a bar set too high because there are
two other requirements to be fulfilled before a student can be permitted to do CLE. A student
must pass oral and written interviews. The requirement of a minimum CGPA of 3.2 or even 3.0
does not take into account the challenges students face. It does not consider their economic
background which affects their class performance and yet such students would be interested in
CLE.
The fundamental basis upon which CLE emerged was that in preparation for legal practice,
classroom lectures fell short of equipping students with practical skills. Students cannot have
these skills developed adequately in the usual classroom lectures due to the large number of
students in such classes. These are practical professional skills and CLE students are exposed to
them through law clinics.
CLE students are barred in many jurisdictions from representing clients in court. In Uganda and
India for example students are barred from representing clients before courts which is one of the
main reasons CLE is not able to develop12
10
HC CA N0.589 of 2005
11
Brun L ‘Is Traditional Lecture an Effective Law Teaching Method?’
12
Pandey, “Experimenting with Clinical Legal Education to Address the Disconnect Between the Larger Promise of
Law and its Grassroots Reality in India”, pg.139
Staffing problems. Another challenge is the over concentration of Advocates in Urban areas
and in the area of criminal law practice as compared to other areas in Tanzania and other areas
of Law. As a result, there is shortage of legal help as and when required or it turns out
expensively. Most lawyers also prefer private practice to public service13
Budgeting problems

13
For more information refer to www.education.stateuniversity.com