By Professor Donald Nicolson, Essex Law School

The dark days of December were somewhat relieved by the arrival of my book, How to Set Up and Run a Law Clinic: Principles and Practices (published by Edward Elgar). It was written with two friends and colleagues: JoNel Newman and Richard Grimes. I met JoNel at a workshop on teaching ethics at Atlanta and subsequently we have co-written articles and given papers on clinics and ethics, and ran a student exchange programme between her Health Rights Clinic at the University of Miami and the University of Strathclyde Law Clinic which I set up. Richard and I go even further back, as he is one of the leading UK figures in clinical legal education and I learnt a lot from him when he was an external examiner for the innovative Strathclyde Clinical LLB I developed.

When Edgar Elgar approached me to write this book, I immediately turned to JoNel and Richard to ensure a variety of perspectives on clinics and clinical legal education. Richard has been involved in clinics for even longer than me, having set up one of the first in England while being involved in many others ranging from Afghanistan to Vietnam, as well as the Clinical Legal Education Organisation (of which I am trustee). He has always seen clinics primarily as a vehicle for improving legal education – though he is also passionate about serving the community. As someone who was involved in University of Cape Town Legal Aid, a totally student-run clinic, designed to redress the dire state of access to justice in apartheid South Africa, my motivation for setting up two law clinics in the UK was rather different. I saw community service through voluntary, as opposed to curricular, student activities as the overriding goal and instinctively involved students in clinic development and the management of the clinics I set up (the University of Bristol and University of Strathclyde Law Clinics). Much later, I came round to formalising student learning, not least because this aids in the inculcation of ethical and justice values. Indeed, I set up the Clinical LLB to allow students to integrate their three to five years of clinical experience throughout the standard law curriculum. JoNel fitted somewhere between our perspectives: all her students get credit for their one year of clinic work, but her clinic also seeks to serve as many of the community as is possible. As expected, these different perspectives gave rise to many robust debates between us, but hopefully – along with being able to draw on more than a hundred years of clinical experience – it enabled us to provide a comprehensive guide to all the things prospective clinics need to think about and existing clinics might benefit from rethinking. Pearls, after all, are created by grit in the shell!

Turning to the book itself, Chapter One provides an introduction to student law clinics and clinical legal education and their long history (the first clinic was established in Denmark more than 130 years ago!). The second chapter then examines the different goals clinics might have, most notably educating students and serving the community – the tension between which runs as a theme running throughout the rest of the book – as well as enhancing student employability, universities’ reputation, and a more diverse legal profession. The next chapter then looks at basic organisational options clinics must consider: whether they are curricular or extra-curricular; voluntary or optional; live or simulated; run in-house or through placements; managed by staff or students; and finally whether they are free or (surprisingly to some) fee-charging.

The next three chapters look at the heart of clinic operations. Chapter Four surveys what services clinics can provide. These range from the more limited and individually oriented ones of legal advice or other limited forms of ‘unbundled’ services like form-filling to the more extensive representation of individuals in disputes and the provision of ‘transactional’ services to businesses and other organisations. Much wider in their impact are what we call ‘wholesale services’ which try to help large groups of people by changing the law either through legislative or administrative reform or strategic litigation, by assisting communities acting to bring about social changes, or by educating the public or other service providers about the law (public legal education or Street Law). Chapter Fives looks at choices relating to service delivery models: by whom (students only on or professionals); when (term-time only, day-time only); where (on campus or in the community); and how (face-to-face, online or via the web). Having extensively researched the hundreds of clinics world-wide, it was highly instructive to learn how many different ways there are of serving the public and enhancing student development. No one clinic can come close to offering the full range of services, but a major aim of the book is to help them make more informed decisions about which to develop, and to consider alternatives to their current model.

Chapter Six is devoted to how best to train, supervise, teach and assess students, as well as other means of quality assurance in clinics. Chapter Seven looks at various ways to ensure that they are effective and sustainable and then the final chapter provides a checklist for establishing and maintaining a successful clinic. Here, in particular, I have drawn on much we do at  the Essex Law Clinic, such as our unique system of Bronze to Platinum progression and our ‘Summer List’ of possible improvements to the Clinic (so called because this is the only time we can take a breath from the helter-skelter of training, students, handling cases and running projects!).

However, the debt to Essex Law Clinic goes deeper than that. Having set up two law clinics based largely on my experience in the student-run University of Cape Town clinic, coming to a very different model forced me to rethink quite a lot of my assumptions and come up with new ways of ensuring that the clinic reaches its potential in serving the public and its student members. Hopefully, others will benefit from the extensive personal experiences and survey of the clinical literature we drew on to write this book.  

‘This book is very comprehensive and well-researched. It will be particularly helpful to academics wanting or needing to start a clinic. It shows them the choices they need to make on key issues and the options they have. It will also be a useful resource for those who take clinic design seriously.’

– Jeff Giddings, Monash University, Australia

‘How I wish this book had been available when I set up my first clinic! A comprehensive and detailed resource, full of wisdom, experience and practical know-how that will prove a go-to text for clinicians new and experienced alike. I am delighted that I will have it to hand hereafter.’

– Linden Thomas, University of Birmingham, UK

‘This book is a tremendous resource for legal educators around the world. It includes a comprehensive examination of the challenges of setting up an effective and sustainable legal clinic, with insightful analysis of often competing academic and public service goals as well as practical approaches to meeting those challenges.’

– Frank S. Bloch, Vanderbilt University Law School, US

‘The book is a comprehensive smorgasbord of options for establishing, managing and developing CLE programmes with a social justice service element, based on the extensive international and national experience of the three authors and other clinical law teachers. It provides a valuable addition to the global publications in the field.’

– David McQuoid-Mason, University of KwaZulu