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Abstract

Twenty-five years ago, I was appointed to the faculty of Columbia Law School and asked to start a clinical program. In retrospect, I can see that I knew very little about how to construct a clinic, or even about what questions to ask myself or others about clinic design. I therefore began by doing what most people do in new or unfamiliar situations: I tried to replicate what I knew best from my prior experience. I had worked as a lawyer on the staff of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, so I tried to work with students, as I had at the Fund, on a variety of large-scale federal court test cases. That effort was only somewhat successful in the law school context, and I flailed around for about five years, trying out one clinic design after another before finding a structure that was even moderately stable. A generation later, we have a wealth of literature on law school clinics, including several grand symposia and even this wonderful law review devoted to clinical legal education. But most of the articles, and most of the clinicians' conference programs, focus primarily on the theories of advocacy or methods of teaching. New clinical teachers constantly enter the field, new clinics are still being designed, and older clinics are frequently restructured. But even in the mid-1990s I could not find any manual for designing-or restructuring-a clinical program. Once again I needed one, because for the sixth time, I had to design (or more accurately in this instance, redesign) a clinical program.

Publication Title

Clinical Law Review

Volume

3

Issue

1

First Page

175

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