Clinical Legal Education (CLE) has been a significant part of legal education since 1960. The first clinic started in U. K. in 1970, in Australia in 1990s. The concept is fast expanding across the globe also. The Clinical Legal Education is necessary to bridge a gap between theory and practice. The aim of this article is to know the various types of Clinical legal Education, its necessity in curriculum and current initiatives and practices in Indian Clinical Legal Education.

According to Article 39-A, Constitution of India, “The State shall secure that the operation of the legal system promotes justice, on a basis of equal opportunity, and shall, in particular, provide free legal aid, by suitable legislation or schemes or in any other way, to ensure that opportunities for securing justice are not denied to any citizen by reason of economic or other disabilities.” Article 14 of the Constitution of India entitles every person, equal protection of law to guarantee the enjoyment of justice, liberty, equality and fraternity; the four paramount aspirations of the Constitution. Constitutional guarantee of equality before law and equal protection of law would be meaningless if people are expected to represent themselves in court. It would be more meaningless if they are required to do it merely because they cannot afford lawyers’ fees. Further, if free legal aid is limited to litigation, it is inadequate and futile as several matters do not necessarily involve litigation yet require professional help. Such services are often more important as they assist the people in deciding how to respond to legal issues and avoiding litigation.

Clinical Legal Education:

Meaning:

The concept of practical problem solving whether by working in a laboratory or in a field, as an important means of developing skills has been acknowledged since time immemorial. Research can contribute significantly towards the improvement in teaching and more importantly, addressing numerous challenges relating to law and justice. The term, “Clinical Legal Education” or law clinic traditionally refers to a non-profit law practice usually serving a public interest or a group in the society that are in an underprivileged or exposed situation and lack access to legal system.

R. Grimes, a well-known author in his book “The Theory and Practice of Clinical Legal Education” 138 (Teaching Lawyers skills 1996) defines “law clinic” as: “A learning environment where students identify, research and apply knowledge in a setting which replicates, at least in part, the world where it is practiced…It almost inevitably means that the student takes on some aspect of a case and conducts this as it would be conducted in the real world.”

According to Professor N.R. Madhava Menon (1998, Clinical Legal Education; chapter 2, Pg.25, Eastern Book Company Lucknow), Clinical Legal Education does not aim to create future lawyers who are mere craftsmen manipulating advocacy skills in the traditional role of conflict resolution in court. He refers to Clinical Legal Education as: “Clinical Legal Education as a pedagogic technique has its focus on the learners and the process of learning.”

According to Richard Lewis (Clinical Legal Education Revisited”; Professor of Law, Cardiff University, Wales, United Kingdom), “Clinical Legal Education is essentially a multi-disciplined, multipurpose education which can develop the human resources and idealism needed to strengthen the legal system… a lawyer, a product of such education would be able to contribute to national development and social change in a much more constructive manner.”

The Clinical Legal Education is a term which encompasses learning which is focused on enabling students to understand how the law works in action. This can be done by undertaking real or realistic simulated case work. The legal education clinics if properly channelled may help the students to gain their knowledge. The use of the word ‘clinic’ prompts the analogy of trainee doctors meeting real patients in their medical clinics. Clinical Legal Education is only one way in which theory and practice can be brought together.

Types of Clinics:

​Legal Clinics allow law students to practice law with actual clients facing real legal issues. Legal Clinics enable law students to hone their lawyering skills through actual legal practice. Students can build their practice skills in a particular practice area while also building practice experience on their resume. Roy Stuckey, a clinical legal education professor at the University of South Carolina, noted that there are three types of clinical course:

Simulation Clinic:

Its essence is of learning-by-doing. Students can learn from variety of simulations of what happens in legal practice. They develop lawyering skills by participating in practice-based exercises in which they perform the legal tasks required to effectively represent a client in the type of dispute or transaction being simulated or with respect to the type of legal issue being researched. Cases can be acted out in their entirety, from the taking of initial instructions to a negotiated settlements or Court hearing. Such sessions can be run as intensive courses or spread through all or part of the academic year in weekly slots, e.g., Moot Court.

Other simulations can range from negotiation exercises, client interviewing exercises, transaction exercises etc. Through a simulation, the instructors evaluate student performance and provide feedback so that students may improve from one exercise to the next. 

Simulation clinic has several advantages than other clinics. In this type of clinic risk and unpredictability of the real-client work are removed, the same materials are used for many times and hence cost is substantially less than real clinic. The administration of the simulation is very difficult.

The In-House Real Client Clinics:

In-House Clinics are legal clinics housed within the law school providing legal services to actual clients facing current legal issues. It is offered, monitored and controlled in law school. In-House Clinics offer the opportunity to practice in chosen practice area. In this type of clinic the clients require actual solutions to their actual problems hence it is called as real client clinic. The client may be selected from a section of the public. The service is given in the form of advice only or advice and assistance. In this type of Clinics, Clients are interviewed and advised orally or in writing and also helped with the preparation of their cases. The clinic may operate as a paralegal services or a fully-fledged solicitor’s practice. Examples would include outreach camps held by the community legal cell in villages in Maharashtra.

The Out-House Clinic:

It is a clinic that involves students in exercising legal work outside the college or university. These types of clinics may operate on the basis of advice giving only. Such agencies are run by trade union councils and other non-statutory bodies. The clinic might take the form of placement also in solicitors’ office or barristers’ chambers. Examples would include the internships students must mandatorily undertake.

Benefits for students:

Clinical legal education provides a learning experience that is difficult to replicate in any classroom setting. This includes

• students can see how their work directly benefits a real person, and thus obtain personal satisfaction from impacting positively on someone’s life,
• students can see the vocational significance of the skills they are developing,
• students are given ‘responsibility and empowerment’, and feel a duty towards their clients,
• the ‘energy of firm meetings frequently compares favourably to the apathy-induced somnambulism pervasive to more traditional seminars’,
• students grow in confidence because of the ‘close-knit’ community of clinics,
• students develop assertiveness skills,
• students frequently do not achieve their potential in seminars by not participating in discussion, whereas clinics require full participation, and
• by applying the law to an actual case students understand concepts previously less clear to them.

Moreover, experience gained from work in ‘real life’ situations has been demonstrated to motivate students and to invigorate their appetite for legal practice.

Advantages of Clinical Legal Education:

• Practical Approach: It takes a unique approach to learning the law. It includes learning as well as experimentation or it involves “learning by doing”. The scope of the client’s problem is determined, and recommendations are made. It generates confidence in students by emphasizing that their achievement is based on their efforts rather than external forces. It enables pupils to explain why they are acting in specific ways and discuss and re-evaluate their choices. Students can delve deeper into legal and social issues. It helps students in self-examination.
• Inspiration and Growth of Students: Students are self-disciplined and dedicated to their studies. Students are more accountable than previous generations. Thus, students are self-motivated and highly committed to the work.
• Acquiring Skills: A lawyer’s ability to acquire certain abilities is critical. Clinical Legal Education is based on a hands-on approach, which aids in the development of skills. Skills may include skills like research skill, communication skill, client and witness interviews, counselling, drafting, negotiating, and problem-solving, among others, may be required. These skills are very important to a lawyer.
• Professional Ethics and Responsibility: There in need of study of ethics and the professional responsibility and conduct of lawyers. Clinical Legal Education now incorporates practical training, which has increased in recent years.
• Involvement with the Local Community: A law clinic can help to reduce isolation by making the law school more relevant to community. It can offer advice and assistance to local people and help to reduce isolation. It can provide residents with guidance and assistance, as well as aid in the reduction of isolation. There are numerous advantages to this. Students may also be able to comprehend the challenges of people from various generations and backgrounds. This experience can help them have a better knowledge of other people’s perspectives in society, as well as maturity and a sense of responsibility.

Limitations of Clinical Legal Education:

• Integration of Clinic into the Law School: Some eminent authors stated that there is a danger that the clinic will become an isolated outpost of the law school, and not absorbed within its mainstream activity. To avoid students becoming distracted from the rest of their legal education, it is critical to establish obvious ties between substantive law courses and clinic work. For example, problems arising in the clinic can be re-examined in other law classes, research can be done on them, and even action recommended. Some critics say that skills training amounts to little more than teaching “tricks of the trade,”‘ or else maintain that practical training by its very nature cannot be taught in the law school and must therefore be left to the organized bar after the students’ graduation. Although the latter notion has been vigorously attacked as a “classic case of locking the stable door after the horse has escaped, that is, after a partly educated and untrained lawyer is given a license to practice law,”‘ it remains the prevailing view among many legal educators.
• Different Goal than Traditional Curriculum: The little dialogue that exists between the clinical and traditional spheres often centers on the issue of whether the primary goal of the clinic is to provide service to the community or to educate the student.
• Narrow Scope: One problem in clinical integration has been the narrowness and limited subject matter encountered in the existing law school clinic, which contrasts with the far broader range of subject matter in the traditional curriculum. Some clinics confine their cases to minor criminal and traffic cases, while others also take minor civil cases such as landlord-tenant, divorce and welfare. The wide difference in scope between subject matter covered in the classroom and the clinics creates serious obstacles to clinical integration, inasmuch as integration can only be accomplished in those areas common to both the classroom and the clinic.
• Cannot be Run without Sufficient Resources: It has long been recognized that clinical education is expensive, largely because of the lower student-faculty ratio that is required. Extra resources must be dedicated to the clinic’s education and administration. The cost of clinical and skills training has been recognized as staggering. The cost incurred may be backbreaking, not merely for the individual student, but also for the particular institution and its community involved. If the clinic has an open-door policy and tries to handle all cases that come in off the street, resources can be stretched even further. As a result, access must be restricted in some way. The vast difference in cost between traditional classroom teaching and clinical training is a significant obstacle to clinical integration.
• Decrease in Morale: In some situations, the difficulties imposed by the large caseload may have a negative impact on morale of both staff and students.
• Division of Teaching Methodology: Intellectual incompatibility has emerged as a primary obstacle to true integration of clinical programs into the main academic curriculum. Clinical programs have long co-existed with the main curriculum at many law schools based on mutual accommodation. The mutual accommodation is that the clinic is allowed to function unmolested as long as it does not impinge on the traditional prerogative of those in the “main” sphere of the traditional curriculum. The result in many instances has been a clear-cut division of teaching methodology with neither sphere complementing nor intellectually supporting the other. The focus on “quantity” rather than “quality” has indeed given clinical education a bad name in some quarters. Lack of a complementary classroom component has also contributed to the clinic’s inferior educational image.
• Supervisory and Assessment Difficulties: The tasks which students can be asked to carry out in a legal clinic are wide-ranging, including legal research, drafting legal submissions, advising clients in person, drafting letters of advice, assessing evidential issues and considering issues of professional ethics. These tasks require consideration of both substantive and procedural issues, as well as evidential matters. Hence, supervising students in the clinic is a demanding endeavour. The means of assessment should encourage in students a ‘deep’ approach to learning, as opposed to ‘surface’ or ‘strategic’ approaches’. Allied to these issues, is the importance of improving the quality of feedback, by providing it to students at a time when it can be taken on board and used by the student to develop, avoiding negativity and finality
• Relationship with the Local Bar: Clinic lawyers, like all lawyers, are customarily free to choose clients and cases, but rules of professional conduct and antidiscrimination laws may impose limits on this traditional freedom. Some critics say that a legal clinic providing free legal services will jeopardize the law school’s relationship with the local bar.

Clinical Legal Education in India:

In the year 1958, the 14th Report of the Law Commission of India recognised the importance of professional training and for a balance of both academic and vocational training. It recommended that University training must be followed by a professional course concentrating on practical knowledge to those who chose to practice in the Courts. In India, the involvement of Law Colleges in legal aid activity began when the legal aid movement gained momentum in the 1960s. It was assumed that Law Schools could play a significant role in providing legal services and that they would do so through Legal Aid Clinics. As a result, clinical legal education took its roots in India in the late 1960s. Although the number of Law Colleges involved in Clinical education grew in this period, their programs remained fairly small, isolated and voluntary and they were compelled to work with limited financial resources.

Clinical Legal Education in India has gone through many stages of development before a formal inclusion was made in the curriculum. In 1994, a three-member Committee made comprising of Justice A.M. Ahmadi, Justice B.N. Kirpal and Justice Jaganaddha Rao dealt in detail with law school teaching methods. The Committee, in its report, among other things recommended inclusion of the problem method, moot courts, and mock trials in legal education curricula. Further, it also recommended that the suggested new methods of teaching be made mandatory. There were demands for improved training in skills and ethics in law school. Concerns arose about maintaining the quality of law practice when apprenticeship requirements were eliminated in the early 1960’s. The Bar Council of India reintroduced a one-year training requirement after graduation from law school in 1994, based on recommendations of the Ahmadi Committee.

On the basis of recommendations, the BCI issued a circular directing all universities and law schools to revise their curricula and directed them to incorporate four Practical Papers.

• Paper I: Moot-Court, Pre-trial Preparations and Participation in Trial Proceedings.
• Paper II: Drafting, Pleading and Convincing.
• Paper III: Professional Ethics, Accountancy for Lawyers and Bar-bench Relations. Possible skills to be developed:
• Paper IV: Public Interest Layering, Legal Aid and Para-legal Services.

The Bar Council of India issued a circular, resulting in 21 compulsory courses and 2 optional courses, leaving Universities free to add more subjects. However, the Bar Council did not assume any responsibility for implementing its new directive. The responsibility for training law students in practical matters was simply passed on to the law schools.

In 1998, clinical education was made mandatory and now many Law Schools offer legal services through Legal Aid Clinics with an academic credit. However, in 2008 the BCI issued revised rules on “Standards of Legal Education and Recognition of Degrees in Law” and the practical paper on legal aid was replaced by Alternative Dispute Resolution. But fortunately the rules made it mandatory that each Law School is under the obligation to establish and run a Legal Aid Clinic. This clinic shall be supervised by a senior faculty member with final year students with the help of legal aid authorities, pro bono lawyers and NGOs. However, the Rules are silent about the academic credit for the legal aid work.

Challenges Faced in Initiating Clinical Legal Education in India:

The fundamental challenge faced by the Clinical Legal Education is lack of resources. Lack of resources includes both, human and material resources. Lack in human resources includes insufficient number of trained faculty, lack of expertise, lack of guidance, and failure of BCI to involve the Local Bar, support staff, indifference of the judiciary and lack of public support. Problem with material resources includes financial resources, low access to computers and communication infrastructure, low pay to the part time faculty, practical difficulties such as transport for the students to the rural areas, lack of training manuals, books on Clinical Legal Education, etc.

In addition to these problems, Clinical Legal Education in India also faces problems like mass legal education, low involvement of other faculty in clinical program, part time students, supervision and evaluation of clinical programs, language and cultural differences.

Pursuant to orders of the Supreme Court dated June 29, 2009 and October 6, 2009 in case of Bar Council of India vs. Bonnie FOI Law College & Ors(S.L.P. (C) No. 22337 of 200) , a 3-Member Committee on Reform of Legal Education was constituted which has discussed various challenges in legal education. The committee has submitted its report to the Bar Council of India. The committee has also submitted major issues posed to the legal education in India like:

• Though the BCI has made it mandatory to have clinical legal education in the curriculum, the institutions are not showing much interest in adopting the necessary skills.
• Lack of funding in an area as important as legal education which is keeping the infrastructural, adequate payment to faculties & technical requirements of legal education to back foot.
• Communities are not aware that the law schools provide free legal services
• Loopholes in inspection and recognition of law colleges by BCI.

Suggestions for Improvements:

The following steps are recommended for a bright future for Clinical Legal Education in India:

• Creation of more coherent information about the law and its institutions in different communities so that people can easily know where to go, to get what type of services.
• Law clinics should be established in each law school or institution in the rural or semi-urban areas which is made easily accessible to the members of the community.
• The students must be entitled with the responsibility to take care of all the cases coming in the law clinics including the interviewing and counselling of the client.
• Build teaching materials with the case histories of the varied matters processed in the Clinic
• The University Grants Commission (UGC) should also look at some model institutions which have exceptionally good clinical activities and have trained clinical faculty members and use these models as a basis to develop a curriculum for the faculty development course in clinical education.
• The Bar Council of India must also take recourse to proper measures for the efficient working of the Clinical Legal Education.

Conclusion:

The central theory of clinical legal education is that students learn about law and lawyering by performing lawyering tasks. Clinical methodology is based on the notion that because thinking and doing are integrally related in the practice of law, both operations should be a part of a student’s academic study of law. It provides a different and more pragmatic approach to learning the law; it encompasses experimental learning, or “learning by doing.” It gives opportunities for the knowledge to be applied, and also calls for critical evaluation, reflection and self-examination, so that, students will be self-motivated and highly committed to the work. Furthermore, it helps in acquisition of skills which are very much essential to an advocate. The skills may include like Research skills, Communication skills, interviewing of clients and witnesses, Counselling, Drafting, Negotiating, and Problem Solving etc. skills. This experiential, hands-on learning can add to their holistic understanding of law and prepare students for the rigors of court practice.