Abstract
From the beginning of its resurgence in the 1960s, the clinical movement in American legal education has been driven by a kind of "academic" perspective. Emphasizing the necessary relationship between theory and practice, the central role of ideas in the development of behavioral competence, and the importance of the intellectual dimension of professional socialization, this perspective has shaped not only the intellectual content of most American clinical legal education, but also its programmatic structure. Academic clinical instruction is characterized by a commitment to supervision by full-time law faculty, on cases selected principally for their educational value, based in law offices established in and controlled by law schools (the so-called in-house clinic), to help students acquire a critical and self-conscious understanding of lawyer skill practice, as much as, if not more than, a mastery of those practices in their own right. While many forces contributed to its ascendancy, the academic perspective grew principally out of the lessons learned by clinical teachers from the failure of the apprenticeship (now called externship) method of clinical instruction, popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to gain widespread acceptance in law schools.
Publication Title
Clinical Law Review
Volume
3
Issue
2
First Page
337
Recommended Citation
Robert J. Condlin,
Learning from Colleagues: A Case Study in the Relationship between "Academic" and "Ecological" Clinical Legal Education,
3
Clinical L. Rev
337
(1997).
Available at:
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/clr/vol3/iss2/5