AustLII Home | Databases | WorldLII | Search | Feedback

Legal Education Digest

Legal Education Digest
You are here:  AustLII >> Databases >> Legal Education Digest >> 2004 >> [2004] LegEdDig 50

Database Search | Name Search | Recent Articles | Noteup | LawCite | Author Info | Download | Help

Copeland, A --- "Clinical Legal Education within a Community Legal Centre Context" [2004] LegEdDig 50; (2004) 13(2) Legal Education Digest 3

Clinical Legal Education within a Community Legal Centre Context

A Copeland

[2004] LegEdDig 50; (2004) 13(2) Legal Education Digest 3

10 E Law 3, 2003, pp 1–8

Clinical legal education programs, where students work on real cases for credit towards their degree, have been around in Australia for three almost three decades. Community legal centres are providing rich learning environments for many of these clinical programs. From the first clinic within a community legal centre established by Monash University at Springvale Community Legal Centre, to the most recent established by Deakin University at Geelong Community Legal Centre, many community legal centres and clinics have found benefits from their collaboration.

Being based at a community legal centre means that these clinical programs are in turn able to maximise the learning opportunity for their students. Completing the circle, students who graduate from clinic programs are demonstrating that the lessons learnt were not only how to give legal advice or draft a legal letter. Many clinical programs in Australia have links to, or are based in, community legal centres. This raises some questions about how well the role of a centre as a legal service provider ‘fits’ with its role as a legal education provider. This paper looks at the perceived conflicts, and argues that, far from compromising its educative role, a clinic placed within a community legal centre can offer students unparalleled educative benefit.

The tension between providing legal services to clients and educational benefit to students is a fundamental one to clinical legal education and it has received a lot of attention from academics. Criticism concerning the use of unpaid students to provide legal services had particular resonance in a time when concerns were raised that the federal government was looking to clinics as a means of providing legal services for less cost. Community legal centres have resisted the federal Attorney General’s tendency to see them as a cheaper legal aid, and use this to justify reduced legal aid funding.

Another criticism of the model of clinical legal education operating within community legal centres suggests that once again those most marginalised and disadvantaged by the legal system are losing out. This criticism points out that those using community legal centres often approach the centre to deal with legal issues that have a profound effect on their physical or mental wellbeing. Clinicians have responded to this criticism by pointing out that all the work done is supervised in much the same way as it is within private or government legal practices. Furthermore, students are keenly aware of the responsibility of working on clients’ cases and take it very seriously. Because clinics in Australia are often also community legal centres, clinicians have long had to articulate how the work of students contributes to meeting the needs of the client community. However, clinics are also part of universities, and as such have a responsibility to meet the educational needs of students. Clinicians have always argued against the perception of clinics as simply practical skills training grounds.

One of the forces pulling centres away from a social change model are the federal funding demands to provide more and more individual legal services to disadvantaged clients. More importantly, this model of community legal centres has nothing to offer clinical students that they cannot get elsewhere. If community legal centres are to be simply a copy of legal aid or private practice, then universities will turn to the cheaper and less resource intensive option of internships in those environments. It is perhaps uncontentious that an aim of the modern law school is to go beyond teaching the law and the legal system.

Courses covering feminist analysis and race issues, as well as new approaches in teaching traditional law units, attempt to alert students to the limitations of the system and its role in the socio-political context of the world around them. However, while these courses raise and examine such issues, a clinical course can offer students a first-hand experience of the ways in which the legal system functions and fails, the way it denies some while benefiting others and how real people deal with these issues. This conflict intersects with another one that is at the core of the community legal centre practice. It manifests itself in the continual question of how should community legal centres assign their limited resources. In a society that relies heavily on the law and legal processes to regulate much of everyday life, it is those groups that have little or no access to legal knowledge that are most disadvantaged.

The realities of funding mean that the provision of legal resources for marginalised groups is sparse. How then do community legal centres spend their limited budgets to maximise the benefit to the community? Traditional legal practice in which a client sees a lawyer about their problem and effectively hands over the running of their case to a lawyer is not the most time efficient or cost effective alternative.

Community legal centres have long recognised the difficulties in attempting to continue within the traditional paradigm of legal practice. They see the law in context and have broadened their work to include law reform, policy, media work and even activism. Clinical programs allow students to use, develop and reinforce the legal knowledge they have gained at law school but more importantly they offer a golden opportunity to understand first-hand that legal doctrine does not exist in a vacuum.

This article has tried to suggest some of the benefits in placing a clinical program within a community legal centre. From the perspective of the educational needs of students, the community legal centre not only presents an exposure to legal practice, it is also a site of competing tensions that go to the core of what it is to be a lawyer. It presents a unique opportunity for students to explore their values and views not only as lawyers but also as members of the broader community.


AustLII: Copyright Policy | Disclaimers | Privacy Policy | Feedback
URL: http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/LegEdDig/2004/50.html