Ann Shalleck, “Clinical Contexts: Theory and Practice in Law and Supervision”

This paper examines the decisions that shape supervision in order to highlight the assumptions embedded in the supervisory dialogue and the vision that emerges from the supervisory process.  The supervisory vision is one in which the supervisor constantly identifies the aspects of the law, lawyering, and the legal system that are critical to understanding what it means to be a lawyer. The supervisor must shift between concrete and the abstract, the practical and the reflective, the specific and the general. By doing so, the supervisor constructs a supervision concept through a contextual and constantly changing application of critical perspectives to the clinic work.

There are eight prominent characteristics of supervision:

1. The supervisor is active in defining the content and structure of the clinic experience, and they initiate and direct inquiries into particular topics. 
2. The supervisor engages in a self-conscious decision-making process in shaping supervision.
3. Disclosure with respect to the teacher’s understanding of the supervisory process is an important part of supervision.
4. Supervision requires teachers to engage in different kinds of dialogue, whether directive or open-ended.
5. The student’s action on cases and the knowledge gained from those activities form the organizing principle for intellectual inquiry in supervision.
6. The student-client relationship mediates the teacher’s concern for the client,
7. Supervision requires an inquiry into the institutional structures within which a case arises and the social and political forces that shape the development of the case.
8. All supervisory action is intervention.

Ann Shalleck, “Clinical Contexts: Theory and Practice in Law and Supervision” (1993) 21:1 NYU Rev L & Soc Change 109.