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better, both in terms of the substantivequality of its programs and its imageand prestige in both academic andprofessional circles. University admin-istrators want the same thing, but, likeit or not, the mission of training bright,young law students to be competent andethical practitioners is only part, andat best a secondary part, of theuniversity’s broader mission to createand advance knowledge. Expectationsof the relationship with and supportfrom the central university have to beestablished in this context and thencommunicated effectively to the lawschool community.

So the author’s advice to new deansis do not view your role as that ofgladiator for the law school; the bodyon the floor of the Coliseum is mostlikely to be your own. Demagogerymay play well in the dean searchinterview with faculty already inclinedto feel under-appreciated and devalued,but you are only sowing the seeds foryour future undoing. For sitting deans,it is not only important to inculcate asensitive understanding of and ap-preciation for the broader role of theuniversity as a whole, but also topublicly support it. In sum, be mindfulof what you say about central admin-istration except to a very, very smalland trusted group of advisers, andremember that faithfulness to yourinstitution sometimes means you haveto sleep with the enemy.

CLINICAL LEGALEDUCATION

Evaluating clinical law teaching —suggestions for law professors whohave never used the clinical teachingmethodKE O’Leary29 N Ky L Rev, 2002, pp 491–519

It is important to understand the goalsof clinical teaching and to recognisethat clinical teaching might lookdifferent from other law schoolteaching. A promotion or tenure review

committee cannot use the samelanguage, concepts or benchmarkswhen assessing clinical teaching as ituses in assessing many doctrinalcourses. While the overall goal ofassisting a law student in becoming abetter legal thinker, planner andpractitioner is the same, the specificteaching goals of each type of coursecan be quite different. This assumptionshould not go unexamined. Exper-ienced professors should take the timeto question and understand the valueof new approaches. Unfortunately,there are few good models for eval-uating law teaching generally.

All clinical teaching involves someform of experiential learning that canbe described in a three-step process:1) the student learns to formulate anaction plan; 2) the student enacts thatplan through a structured experience;and 3) the student reflects about theexperience and modifies future actionaccordingly. The clinical process is thusa blueprint for professional growth.While not all clinical law professors usethe same terms in describing what theydo, most clinical law experiences arestructured to take advantage of exper-iential learning and employ a varietyof teaching methods.

Every clinical law professor requiresstudents to engage in some type ofplanning process. Plans are developedby combining lawyering theories,practical information, and legalresearch. Clinical teachers havedifferent approaches to the role oftheory in the development of pro-fessional skills and values. Someclinicians assign materials that describea particular theory of the skill or valueearly in the course and then require thestudents to emulate that theory.Typically, clinicians will requirestudents to develop plans for some orall of the following skills: interviewingclients and/or witnesses, counsellingclients, drafting pleadings, engaging innegotiation or mediation, preparing fora trial or hearing or developingalternative solutions to help the client.

The focus of the planning will reflectthe focus of the course. There areseveral methods to help studentsdevelop action plans. For example,some clinicians favour checklists,forms or protocols to ensure theirstudents learn to think through the sameissues in every case. The choice ofapproach is less important than theplanning which is fostered, althoughthe approach used should match theprofessor’s teaching philosophy.

In any clinical course, the catalystfor learning is the experience com-ponent. Clinical professors make manychoices when designing the experiencecomponent of the course. The exper-iences offered should allow the studentsto practise the skills or apply the valuesthat are the focus of the course. Whilestudents will practise many skills andapply values that are peripheral to thefocus skills and values, priority shouldbe given to those experiences that aremost likely to offer the student theopportunity to practise the focus skillsand values. Whatever the focus,students should be required to exper-ience challenging professional sit-uations that require decision-makingand the exercise of judgment.

The third step to good experientiallearning is reflection upon the exper-ience. Most clinical educators considerthe reflection stage to provide the majorsource of learning. The professor shouldguide the student through a process ofthinking about how well the action plansucceeded. The process demands thatstudents integrate the theory, theexperience and real-life events to learnhow to build upon strengths andimprove upon weaknesses. It is throughreflection that clinical teachers instil alifelong habit of professional self-development and growth.

Faculty who do not teach in clinicsfail to understand some of the extrinsicdemands of the clinical teacher. Thetraditional separation of teaching,service and scholarship as an evaluationdevice is often not a helpful constructwhen evaluating a clinical educator.

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Untenured faculty members arecounselled to limit their serviceactivities to gain more time to workon scholarship and teaching. Suchadvice is not useful for most clinicallaw teachers. While other law pro-fessors might choose to practise law,the clinical law professor practises lawas a requirement of the position. Theclinician is a member of the bar withspecial duties that arise because ofclinical teaching. These special dutiesarise from the reciprocation of theclinician’s need to keep up withdevelopments in law practice special-ties and the profession’s need for inputgleaned from the experiences ofclinical law professors.

Traditional methods for reviewingfaculty may not work when reviewingclinical teachers. Unlike a classroomteacher whose contact with studentsconsists of written materials, classdiscussion or lecture, and perhaps e-mail exchanges, the live-client clinicalfaculty member and the extern super-visor may interact with students on adaily basis by teaching and advising.Most of clinical teaching takes placeoutside the classroom. Moreover, theclassroom is often used as a place toallow students to offer advice to eachother, to raise issues or problems, orto perform exercises, small groupworkshops or case rounds. Theclassroom component is used toaccomplish different objectives for theclinical teacher and is less likely toinvolve significant presentations byfaculty. Thus, observation of classroomactivities is a woefully inadequate wayto evaluate most clinical teaching. Theproblem then becomes, how does afaculty evaluate clinical supervision?

While clinical professors sharemany common goals, there are manydifferences in style, approach, subjectmatter, and method. These differencesshould be welcomed. In fact, manyclinical professors continue to varytheir own teaching styles dependingupon their interests and needs and thoseof their students. It is important for

those reviewing clinical teaching tounderstand the methods used byclinical teachers and to embrace a widerange of different approaches, whilehelping those professors achieve a highlevel of teaching quality.

The divorce case: supervisoryteaching and learning in clinicallegal educationPJ Williams21 St. Louis U Pub L Rev, 2002,pp 331–377

This article explores what and how lawstudents learn in clinical legal edu-cation. More specifically, it examinesthe experiences of students handlingdivorce cases in the clinic and howthose experiences contribute to thelearning process. The article is basedin part on the author’s experience ofteaching and learning during 1998 atCornell University’s Legal Aid Clinic.The article began as a description ofclinical supervision and other clinicalteaching processes; it was intended tohelp newer clinicians and clinicalprograms in thinking through theireducational goals and methods. It hasbecome a broader reflection on lawteaching and how clinical methods cancontribute to more effective teachinggenerally.

Clinical education offers teachingapproaches that can work wellthroughout the law school curriculum.Using clinical processes, law teacherscan encourage students to examine theirroles as lawyers, to wrestle with issuesof professional responsibility that theywill face in practice and to becomereflective lawyers. Clinical teachingmethods provide law students with arich learning experience. This factshould be considered as law teachersdesign their courses.

Since clinical training is notrequired in most law schools, many,if not most, law students completetheir legal education without the kindof supervised practice experience thatthe clinic provides. Students who donot take a clinic course also miss out

on the opportunity to work closely witha faculty mentor and to reflect uponthe role that attorneys play in the legalprocess.

Clinical legal education refers tothat part of the law school curriculum,which provides students with exper-iential training where students learn bydoing. Clinic courses are designedusing a variety of educational models,including externships, where studentsobserve and experience the practice oflaw by working in offices of legalservices programs, prosecutors, judges,or other legal services providers;simulations, where students practiseclient interviewing, counselling,negotiation, trial advocacy, and otherlawyering skills using structuredproblems in a supervised setting; andthe ‘live-client’ or ‘in-house’ clinic,where students function as attorneysrepresenting real clients. Many clinicmodels include a classroom componenttaught by full-time law school facultyor adjuncts.

The place that clinical educationholds in the curricula of modern lawschools has been justified based onimportant substantive training that itoffers to law students, such as trainingin lawyering skills. In addition, andprobably more importantly, clinicaleducation as a method of teaching maybe even more valuable than thesubstantive material taught. The clinicexperience is intended to exposestudents to the practice of law. Theclinic gives students experiences inthree broad areas: (1) students learnand practise a set of lawyering skills;(2) they learn the basics of workingwith clients and being advocates; and(3) they are exposed to a variety ofprofessional ethics issues and issuesrelating to their role as lawyers.

An even more basic goal of theclinic is to provide students with anexperience of legal education that isin some ways fundamentally differentfrom the ‘traditional’ legal educationthey have had up to this point in lawschool. In the clinic students are