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Abstract

Legal education is currently taking tentative steps beyond teaching lawyering skills toward a focus on professional collaborative relationships and human interactions. To this end, many legal educators have embraced a pedagogy that values student collaboration. Clinical education in particular has been praised for providing students with numerous opportunities to work collaboratively, and clinical educators have generally recognized the benefits of collaborative pedagogy to prepare students for the practice of law. Few educators, however, have asked whether collaborative pedagogy in a law school clinic adequately prepares students to face the power differentials and conformance pressures that do not exist in most academic collaborations to the same or similar degree that they exist in practice. In this Article, I seek to explore the distinctions between the working collaborations typically experienced by a student in a law school clinic and the collaborations commonly experienced by a new lawyer in practice. I contend that various conformance pressures existing within professional practice hierarchies operate to dictate lawyer behavior, reduce autonomy and individual choice in lawyering, and shape, perhaps profoundly, the development of the new professional. By understanding the disparities between academic collaborations and practice collaborations, and by taking advantage of opportunities to counterbalance such disparities, clinical educators can help provide students with the foundation they will need in practice to make deliberate, autonomous choices about their own professional development.

Publication Title

Clinical Law Review

Volume

4

Issue

2

First Page

485

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