Category: Format – Article
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Susan L Brooks, “Using Therapeutic Jurisprudence to Build Effective Relationships with Students, Clients and Communities”
This article suggests that clinicians should adopt a therapeutic jurisprudence approach. There are several key principles integral to therapeutic jurisprudence that clinicians in legal clinics should utilize. These principles include: modelling (i.e., how communication impacts students and how supervisors’ interactions may lead students to mirror what they observed); boundaries and limit-setting; transference and counter-transference, the…
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S Ronald Ellis, Study of Parkdale (Toronto) Community Legal Services Clinic
This book sets out the particulars of the Parkdale (Toronto) Community Legal Services Clinic. In particular, it examines the supervisory system within the clinic, which included, at that time: S Ronald Ellis, Study of Parkdale (Toronto) Community Legal Services Clinic (Toronto: Osgoode Hall, 1979).
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Ross Hyams, “On Teaching Students to ‘Act like a Lawyer’: What Sort of Lawyer?”
This article argues that generations of law students are not prepared for the practice of law. Clinical legal educators seek to teach practical legal skills to students; however, they also have the ability to teach students professionalism and, ultimately, how to be lawyers. This requires teaching students how to act, not just how to think.…
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Patrick C Brayer, “A Law Clinic Systems Theory and the Pedagogy of Interaction: Creating a Legal Learning System”
This article explores several techniques to maximize student experience based on professional interactions in the law school clinic. It further sets out a pedagogical approach to clinic design and teaching by advancing a clinical systems theory, explaining how law students develop and grow by interacting with their learning system environment, including teaching students how to…
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Neil Kibble, “Reflection and Supervision in Clinical Legal Education: Do Work Placements Have a Role in Undergraduate Legal Education”
This article sets out a number of theories and criticisms of supervision in clinical legal education. The author suggests that supervision requires encouraging the learner to enter the zone of proximal development. The zone of proximal development (originally developed for childhood learning) refers to the gap between what children can accomplish independently and what they…
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Minna J Kotkin, “Reconsidering Role Assumption in Clinical Education”
This article examines the proposition that clinical methodology, which emphasizes individualized instruction, requires adherence to the role assumption norm. Role assumption by students involves taking on the role of a legal professional while assisting clients, the general experiential framework of clinical legal education. Positive norm assumers will be successful in replicating the norms of the…
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Leah Wortham, Catherine F Klein & Beryl Blaustone, “Autonomy-Mastery Purpose: Structuring Clinical Courses to Enhance These Critical Educational Goals”
This article examines how clinical law teachers can use intrinsic motivation and theories to improve the quality of law student’s learning. The underlying theory assumes that people interact constantly and dynamically with their surroundings rather than predictably. However, other theories, including the self-determination continuum, as replicated below, provide insight into how a law student might…
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Laurel E Fletcher & Harvey M Weinstein, “When Students Lose Perspective: Clinical Supervision and the Management of Empathy”
This article examines how law students and lawyers manage the emotional content of their work. Clinical supervisors can enhance the supervisory process by helping law students recognize, discuss, and interpret the emotional experiences of working with clients. Skilled supervision regarding emotions is essential in training law students to manage empathy and identification with a client,…
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Kylie Fletcher, “Law Clinics Educating for Complexity Through Integrative Learning”
This paper argues that the legal education system is complex; clinical legal education allows for integrative learning experiences from a law-and-society perspective. Levy describes a complex system as: “[O]ne whose component parts interact with sufficient intricacy that they cannot be predicted by standard linear equations; so many variables are at work in the system that…
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Kenneth R Kreiling, “Clinical Education and Lawyer Competency: The Process of Learning to Learn from Experience Through Properly Structured Clinical Supervision”
This paper argues that clinical education should teach students a method which includes: how to develop theories of problem-solving by utilizing established lawyering theory and experience, how to apply these theories in practice, and how to analyze oneself to improve performance. The paper examines the nuance associated with the aforementioned teaching method, such as awareness…