Abstract
The inauguration of the Clinical Law Review raises an obvious question: What are the varieties of clinical scholarship? The journal then provides the forum, and perhaps the impetus, for the many sorts of answers that the question of its existence suggests. The essay that follows is one form of answer. It is not offered as prescription, merely as one possibility. This essay emerges from my view of the unique location of clinical education within legal academia. To my mind, clinical education stands at the crossroads of contemporary jurisprudential movements that draw on critical legal theory: in particular, critical race theory, feminist theory, law and literature, and narrative jurisprudence. In the hands of these overlapping movements, theory is a practice. More specifically, each of these movements focuses on the process by which legal theory is constructed and insists that the theories be grounded in the multiple ways that diverse people experience law in their daily lives. Grounding the theories requires telling the stories of these experiences. The critical bite derives from the commitment within each of these movements to include the pluralist perspectives of subordinated peoples, whose stories have been so frequently overlooked in the formulation of legal theory and of the dominant stream of cultural understandings. In the hands of many, this method also has a distinctively post-modern cast, for the surfacing of previously submerged stories illuminates the power dynamic by which some stories become privileged and others marginalized, posits the inevitability of this dynamic, and suggests that understanding is possible only once we accept that it is ever evolving, never complete, and dependent on the continuous and scrupulous application of this narrative method.
Publication Title
Clinical Law Review
Volume
1
Issue
1
First Page
65
Recommended Citation
Phyllis Goldfarb,
A Clinic Runs Through It,
1
Clinical L. Rev
65
(1994).
Available at:
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/clr/vol1/iss1/6