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Abstract

When I first started my career in clinical education in 1968 at Northwestern Law School, I spent most of my time practicing law, supervising students, and thinking about how my colleagues and I could dramatically improve some small corner of the world through law reform and representation of groups promoting radical societal change. It seems that I now spend most of my time on curriculum development, evaluation, and administration of the large and growing in-house and externship clinical programs at the Chicago-Kent College of Law. I still think about improving the world through clinical education, but I now tend to think about doing so by helping the profession through improving the quality of legal education. In this paper, I will focus on one such effort: a new educational program we have developed at Chicago-Kent, entitled "Litigation and Alternative Dispute Resolution" ("LADR"). Our program was developed shortly before the Report of the Task Force on Law Schools and the Profession: Narrowing the Gap ("MacCrate Report") was issued. However, those of us involved in the design of LADR had the opportunity to review early drafts of the MacCrate Report and its "Statement of Fundamental Lawyering Skills and Professional Values" ("SSV"), and these drafts informed and helped shape our thinking. Moreover, we have had the benefit of the final version of the MacCrate Report and the SSV as we have enhanced and refined LADR over the course of the past two years. This paper begins with a short discussion of the two basic assumptions of the LADR program. Next, it describes the curriculum. Finally, it explains at some length the ways in which the program goes beyond the vision of legal education set forth in the MacCrate Report.

Publication Title

Clinical Law Review

Volume

1

Issue

2

First Page

425

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