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Abstract

As a teacher in a criminal practice-based clinic, I often feel like an eavesdropper on the discourse among clinicians about lawyering skills and professional values. Both the context of, and the language describing, criminal law practice, are sufficiently different from civil practice to make it difficult to teach many of the lessons and approaches developed in traditional texts used in clinical education, particularly those concerned with client-counseling. The dissonance between the sounds heard in a criminal and civil practice was loud when I was teaching a criminal defense clinic. When I moved on to teach an in-house prosecutor's clinic, the discord became deafening. My experience in a prosecutor's program, which I began after many years of teaching a live-client defense clinic and several externships, posed many atypical, idiosyncratic pedagogical issues, none more paradoxical than whether and how to teach counseling in the absence of a client. The separateness I had always felt practicing and teaching about criminal law never felt wider than when I tried to explore approaches to relationships between prosecutors and the individual crime victims whose interests they ostensibly represented. I was now excluded even from the client-related concerns of my criminal defense clinical colleagues.

Publication Title

Clinical Law Review

Volume

5

Issue

1

First Page

1

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