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Rees, Neil --- "How Should Law Schools Serve Their Communities?" [2001] UWSLawRw 9; (2001) 5(1) University of Western Sydney Law Review 111


HOW SHOULD LAW SCHOOLS SERVE
THEIR COMMUNITIES?

Neil Rees

Setting the task

The topic assigned to me - 'How should law schools serve their communities?' - encourages one to ask two preliminary questions:

1. What are laws schools for?
2. What are the communities that law schools serve?

In order to prepare answers to these questions one can visit a range of sources that include strategic plans, scholarly works by legal academics and reports from the various bodies which have been charged, from time to time, with the functions of reviewing legal education and proposing reform. The least useful of these sources tend to be law school strategic plans which have a depressing tendency to be uninformative pieces of rhetoric. They are documents of a disposable age; will anyone be interested to read the strategic plans of 2000, even a decade later?

Setting the scene

Before attempting to provide my own answers to the questions that have been posed it may be useful to quote some useful facts and figures, which I have drawn together from a number of different sources:

There are 28 law schools in Australia serving a population of approximately 19 million people. In 1960 there were six law schools; in the mid-1980s - at the time of the Pearce Report into legal education – there were 12 law schools.[1]
In the United States, which has a population of approximately 270 million people, there are 176 law schools accredited by the American Bar Association.[2]
There are 21 law schools in Canada, which has a population of approximately 30 million people.[3]
In 1999 there were 25,179 students enrolled in Australia’s 28 law schools[4] ; in 1984 there were 11, 254 students in the country’s 12 law schools[5] .
In 1999 there were 38,486 lawyers in Australia with a practising certificate, which means that law students (25,179) represent 65 percent of the practising profession[6] .
In Australia we have one lawyer for every 478 people, compared with one lawyer for every 320 people in the United States.
In 1999 the largest law school in terms of student numbers (Monash) had 1,963 students; the smallest law school (Notre Dame) had 295 students[7] .
A recent survey revealed that 1 percent of people who graduated from law school in 1991, and 4 percent of 1995 law graduates, are unemployed[8]
In the same survey it was reported that 78 percent of the 1991 law graduates, and 76 percent of the 1995 law graduates, were in law related employment[9] .
In 1999 there would not have been an Australian law school that was spending more than $5,000 (Australian) per head to educate its law students, whereas many of the larger American law schools spend up to $20,000 (U.S.) per year per student on legal education[10] .

What does this information demonstrate? For present purposes perhaps little more than that legal education has grown substantially

in a short period of time, that law graduates appear to do well in the labour market and that, compared to at least one other country, we do not spend much money on legal education.

What are law schools for?

A trip to a reasonably well stocked law library leads one to an impressive array of materials, often written by eminent scholars, which promises to produce a comprehensive, if not definitive, answer to this question.

Despite reading such interesting works as Professor Peter Birks’ edited book titled ‘What are law schools for?’[11] , Professor William Twining’s similarly titled chapter in his wonderful book ‘Blackstone’s Tower: The English Law School’[12] , the Pearce Report[13] , which is still essential reading for all Australian legal educators, the MacCrate Report, which is a report to the American Bar Association from its Task Force on Law Schools and the Profession[14] , the report of the Lord Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on Legal Education and Conduct, known as the ACLEC Report,[15] and all of the chapters in ‘New Foundations in Legal Education’[16] , a book edited by three of Australia’s most influential law deans of the past decade – Professors Jack Goldring, Ralph Simmonds and Charles Sampford – I could not locate an attempt at an answer to this question.

Each of the authors and the reports to which I have referred has looked in detail at particular aspects of law school life, usually the education and training of prospective members of the legal profession. This, of course, is only part of what law schools are for.

I have decided to attempt my own ‘laundry list’ of the functions of a law school. There is nothing new in this list; I have taken the views of others, too numerous to mention, and placed them in my own inventory. I suggest that the functions of a law school include the following –

To educate prospective legal practitioners
To provide legal education to people who do not wish to become legal practitioners
To assist people from other disciplines to include a legal perspective in their teaching and research
To support postgraduate legal research
To provide continuing legal education to members of the legal profession
To provide legal education and legal information to members of the general community
To be storehouses of legal knowledge
To be organisers and expositors of legal knowledge
To assist in the creation of new laws
To evaluate the operation of laws and legal institutions
To be informed critics of laws and legal institutions
To assist in the provision of legal services to the community
To assist in maintaining a society which values and supports the rule of law

What are the communities that law schools serve?

If one accepts at least some of the functions of law schools that have been advanced, the identification of the communities that we serve is not a particularly onerous task. At least some of those communities are –

Law students
University students in other disciplines
The academic and general staff of law schools
The staff of other disciplines in our universities
University management
The legal profession
The judiciary
The legislative and executive branches of government
The consumers of legal services
The general public

How should law schools serve their communities?

As an analysis of the functions of law schools and an assessment of the reasonable needs of the communities they serve could sustain a doctoral thesis, I shall concentrate upon three issues which, in my opinion, are of particular significance in a modern society which demonstrably values the rule of law, but which is so complex and which has so many legal rules that no one person could ever hope to understand all of those aspects of our society which are regulated by law, nor reasonably aspire to know the content of all of our laws.

In 1984 an American legal academic, Professor Anthony Amsterdam of New York University, wrote an influential article on legal education titled ‘Clinical Legal Education – a 21st century perspective’.[17] In this paper Amsterdam transported himself 20 years into the future and sought to paint a picture of how legal education would (or perhaps more accurately, should) look in the early years of the 21st century.

I would like to be bold enough to pursue a similar undertaking: to look at three ways in which law schools could be serving their communities by 2020. My aspirations are –

A true partnership between law schools, legal aid organisations and the private profession which greatly enhances the significance of clinical legal education and which advances access to legal services by members of the community.
A significant contribution by the staff and students of law schools to informed community debate about legal issues through provision to the public of accessible and timely information.
A body of legal scholarship that promotes an 'evidence based' approach to critical evaluation of the law, legal institutions and law reform proposals.

Let me consider each of these aspirations in turn.

A clinical legal education and access to legal services partnership

The partnership that I propose has the potential to be an evolutionary development caused by changes in attitude to the content of legal education and by creative responses to the parlous state of institutional legal aid.

A review of the voluminous literature in the field of legal education invites agreement with Professor Twining’s assertion that there is little to be said which is new[18] . But, perhaps there are different ways of saying the same thing, and new mechanisms for achieving previously articulated goals. Sixty-seven years ago, Jerome Frank, one of the leaders of the American realist movement, in an article titled ‘Why not a clinical lawyer- school?’[19] , suggested that law schools should look more like medical schools. I repeat that suggestion.

Over time, many legal scholars have sought to refine and develop Frank’s thesis; some legal educators have sought to implement his ideal. Developments in Australia during the 1990’s have been encouraging. At least 14 of the country’s 28 law schools now offer some form of clinical legal education[20] and the Commonwealth Attorney-General has recently provided special funding, albeit at modest levels, for clinical legal education programs.

Many of the old battles fought by legal educators about the purpose and nature of legal education are over. Few legal academics support a strict division between the 'academic' and 'vocational' stages of legal education - wrongly attributed to the Ormrod Committee[21] - which generated the ‘Pericles and the Plumber debate’, as Professor Twining called it[22] . In nearly all university disciplines we have embraced the notion that our courses should include some vocational preparation.

In both the US[23] and the UK[24] recent comprehensive national inquiries into the educational needs of lawyers have helped to cast aside the old academic / vocational divide and to promote what Professor Bob Hepple describes as 'integrated education and training, in which liberal values and transferable professional skills are learnt throughout the educational process by in-depth study of law'.[25]

The recent ALRC Report into the federal civil justice system[26] supported the approaches to legal education advocated by MacCrate in the US and ACLEC in the UK and welcomed the comprehensive Australian developments in clinical legal education over the past decade. In criticising the 'frozen knowledge' approach to legal education, which is the essential feature of the ‘Priestley 11’ requirements, and in recommending that 'university legal education in Australia should involve the development of high level professional skills and a deep appreciation of ethical standards and professional responsibility'[27] the ALRC has provided substantial encouragement to those legal educators who aspire to move closer to Jerome Frank’s ‘clinical lawyer school’.

Before proceeding to articulate my vision of how this could be done, some attempt at definition may be helpful. A great deal has been written about clinical legal education in Australia in the past few years. Jeff Giddings[28] has recently provided us with a useful short history, together with a snapshot of current clinical programs, whilst Simon Rice[29] has published ‘A Guide to Implementing Clinical Teaching Method in the Law School Curriculum’. Even though both authors acknowledge that there is no widely accepted definition of clinical legal education, both emphasise the centrality of 'live-client' experience. As Rice says, 'it is the student participation in the complexity of the lawyer/client dynamic which offers opportunities for achieving the various educational goals outlined... and which gives the clinical method its unique character.'[30] Student acceptance of professional responsibility, reflection, critique of performance and community service are also widely regarded as essential features of clinical legal education. Interestingly, Rice rejects skills training as an objective of clinical legal education.[31] Here I part company with him, but perhaps our disagreement is more one of nomenclature than of substance.

To partition an educational process into a rigid divide between the acquisition of knowledge and the development of skills seems to defy common sense. In my opinion it is neither easy nor useful to label particular components of legal education as falling on one side or the other of an artificial knowledge/skills divide. In a community with so many laws that change so rapidly, few people are likely to confidently assert that the job of law schools is 'to impart to students a self-contained body of instruction in the law'.[32] Even the traditionalists are likely to agree with Professor Amsterdam’s characterisation of three kinds of analytic thinking which law schools have a responsibility to ensure their students acquire: case reading and interpretation, doctrinal and factual application, and logical conceptualisation and criticism.[33] Are these skills or simply accompaniments to knowledge? It doesn’t really matter, just as it doesn’t matter how we characterize competence in legal research and writing, which are attributes every legal educator is likely to insist be acquired by all students prior to graduation from law school.

Amsterdam makes the obvious points that appropriate clinical legal education provides 'training in effective techniques for learning law from the experience of practising law'[34] and that it provides education in methods of analytical thinking used by lawyers, but not usually associated with case-book, class room teaching. These methods include ends-means thinking, hypotheses formulation and testing, and decision-making in dynamic situations. Some people may classify these abilities, as well as the capacity to engage in self-directed and experiential learning, as skills. I repeat that I don’t think it really matters, and I believe that Simon Rice may be prepared to alter his views about the role of skills training in clinical legal education if Amsterdam’s learning objectives for clinical legal education are cast as 'skills'.

Before moving to describe why I consider a partnership between clinical legal education programs, institutional legal aid and pro bono legal service providers to be desirable, and to discuss how that partnership may operate, it is useful to consider another widely accepted objective of clinical legal education, community service. The history of Australian clinical legal education is steeped in community service. As Rice points out, 'clinical programs at Monash University (1975) and UNSW (1981) were to a large extent born of the idealism and drive for social justice that had been a force in the growth of clinical legal education in the USA'.[35] Giddings agrees and suggests that even today the majority of academics working in clinical programs have a long history of involvement with community legal centres.[36] Thus, the community service ethic of clinical legal educators is likely to greatly influence the nature of their programs for the foreseeable future.

At the moment we are experiencing a growing interest in community service amongst what some people would describe as the elite end of the legal profession: solicitors in national law firms and members of the bar. The Commonwealth Attorney-General’s recent pro bono initiative has attracted staggering support and most of the major law firms are devoting considerable resources to their pro bono practices.

The reasons for this upsurge in altruism amongst the leaders of the private profession are matters for another day, but legal academics may lay some claim to having played an important role in identifying a malaise for which an interest in community service is a partial antidote, and for having stoked the fires of the 'good lawyer' debate. Perhaps those at the top of the private profession in Australia have anticipated the arrival of Professor Anthony Kronman’s[37] 'lost lawyer' on Australian soil and have sought to prevent him or her from breeding. Whilst I do an injustice to Kronman, the former Dean of Yale Law School, by attempting to summarise his book in a sentence, his central thesis is that the highly paid, narrow technocrat who works in the large American law firms is a deeply unhappy person because he or she is professionally unfulfilled by a career which denies him or her both the opportunity to engage in public service and the chance to acquire practical wisdom by assisting ordinary people with their real-life dilemmas. In Australia academics such as Professors Andrew Goldsmith, Stephen Parker and David Weisbrot have sparked a useful debate about what it means to be a 'good lawyer'.[38]

Whilst some of us may regard the term pro bono publico, when used in the context of the provision of legal services, as a Latin synonym for charity, most of us with long memories, together with students of the history of legal aid in Australia, would consider charitable donation always to have been a major component of Australian legal aid.

This leads me directly to the proposed partnership between clinical legal education programs, pro bono legal service providers and institutional legal aid, by which I mean the legal services provided by Legal Aid Commissions, as opposed to community legal centres or stand alone public interest practices such as the Public Interest Advocacy Centre. Law schools have a long history of association with community legal centres and I trust that these relationships will continue. Indeed law schools may rightly claim to have played a more significant role than any other institution in spawning the extraordinary community legal centre movement. In a little over 25 years we have established 170 community legal centres in Australia[39] . According to my research only 11 of these community legal centres work in partnership with law schools offering clinical legal education programs.

There is scope for additional partnerships, but the capacity of community legal centres to cope with the numbers and the clinical legal needs of law students are quite limited. Community legal centres tend to be small, maverick organizations, often focussed upon relatively narrow areas of legal activity and often staffed by relatively inexperienced lawyers who do not relish the thought of supervising law students. Many community legal centres fear, perhaps quite rightly, a loss of independence through a formal association with a university law school. Others, such as Kingsford, Monash-Oakleigh and Newcastle, are fully controlled by law schools and constantly compete with other activities for a share of the law school’s meagre budget. Most importantly, community legal centres do not see themselves providing a broad range of legal services to the general community, as of right. That was, previously, the role of legal aid commissions.

In a speech delivered last year, the Commonwealth Attorney-General stated, 'Australia does not operate an entitlement system for the provision of legal aid'.[40] Interestingly, whilst the Attorney-General’s paper was titled 'Why should all Australians be equal before the law?' he did not consider the inequality wrought by the inability of most Australians to pay for private legal services, nor the conundrum produced by his failure to acknowledge that in a society governed by the rule of law, there is no right to basic legal services.

Eligibility for legal assistance from state legal aid commissions is such a complex matter that it is impossible to give a useful summary of the circumstances in which a person may receive free, or reduced rate, legal assistance. The commissions apply jurisdiction, merits and means tests. Many legal matters now fall outside the jurisdictional limits of legal aid commissions and the means tests are so strict that few people in any form of full-time paid employment qualify for legal aid. It is highly unlikely that this position will improve in the foreseeable future.

In order to develop the clinical legal education aspirations of many law schools, and to improve the availability of legal aid, I suggest partnerships between law schools and legal aid providers based upon the teaching hospital model. For many years public health authorities and medical schools have worked together to make teaching hospitals centres of excellence in the provision of public health services. Medical students, recent graduates and registrars (specialists in training), as well as students in the other health professions, bear a significant proportion of the caseload in our large public hospitals. In law we could do the same thing.

In the past, legal aid commissions have been reluctant to become involved in clinical legal education programs. I suspect that the reasons for this reluctance ranged from a commendable desire to provide legal aid clients with a quality service from qualified people, through to outmoded public sector union concerns about unpaid students filling positions which would otherwise be occupied by paid union members.

This is the time for some lateral thinking from Attorneys-General and legal aid commissioners. Even the most starry eyed optimist is unlikely to suggest that governments will provide legal aid commissions with sufficient funds to engage enough qualified lawyers to meet the legitimate legal service needs of those members of the community who cannot meet the cost of private legal services. Some very lateral thinking may bring about a three-way partnership between large law firms with an interest in pro bono legal work, law schools and publicly funded legal aid providers.

There is little to be lost by experimenting with new models. In NSW the provision of public health services has been given back to local communities[41] ; area health services now operate facilities ranging from large teaching hospitals through to small community outreach services. Students work in all of them. There may be a case for dismantling legal aid commissions and establishing local area legal services. A pooling of legal aid, university and private sector resources and expertise has every chance of enhancing the breadth and quality of public legal services, whilst at the same time dramatically improving the education of the next generation of lawyers.

Many students enter law schools with high ideals. Approximately 25 percent of the respondents to the Centre for Legal Education’s ‘Career Intentions of Australian Law Students’ survey indicated that they chose to study law, either because of 'interest in the subject matter of the law', or as a 'way of making a contribution to the community'[42] . The limited data available suggests that students do not find their law school experience as inspirational as it could, or should, be. Professor David Weisbrot is fond of pointing out that the comprehensive survey of law graduates, which was conducted as part of the work of the Pearce Committee, revealed that the personal value most influenced by legal education, was cynicism[43] . Indeed only 10 percent of graduates reported that legal education made them 'more idealistic'. Student exposure to ‘public interest lawyering’ at a local area legal service may improve this figure and offer genuine career alternatives.

If there is some truth in Anthony Kronman’s assertion that a life of well paid, highly technical legal work in a large law firm will lead to a generation of 'lost lawyers', if there is some truth in the now widely held view that clinical legal education is an indispensable learning mechanism and if there is some truth in the assertion that we must radically re-think the manner in which legal aid services are delivered to the community, law schools may better serve their communities by entering into educational and service partnerships with legal aid organisations and the providers of pro bono legal assistance.

Accessible and timely legal information for the general community

Professor Geoffrey Walker in his important work on the rule of law[44] reminds us that one of the principal features of a society governed by the rule of law is that 'the law should be such that the people will be able and willing to be ruled by it'[45] . In order for the people to be willing and able to be ruled by the law, the people must have reasonable opportunities to access the law and they must be provided with sufficient information to debate its adequacy and to press for reform where necessary.

Law schools have performed well in assisting members of the Australian community to enjoy access to the law. AustLII – The Australasian Legal Information Institute – which is a joint undertaking of the law schools at UNSW and UTS, is a world leader in providing a community with essentially free access to primary legal materials. AustLII is a public service gem that should be nurtured and supported by every Australian law school.

Also of extraordinary significance in the field of public access to the law has been the work of Redfern Legal Centre Publishing. In the foreword to the latest edition of the ‘Law Handbook’[46] , Geoffrey Robertson QC quite rightly identifies law lecturers at UNSW as the founders of the Redfern Legal Centre and describes the work of an early project, the ‘Legal Resources Book’, which was the progenitor of today’s ‘Law Handbook’. Can there be better plain language legal guides anywhere in the world than the various Australian ‘Law Handbooks’?

Australian legal academics have also performed admirably in the roles of organisers, expositors and critics of the law for legal audiences. It is difficult to identify a field of law that lacks an authoritative treatise, university law journals abound and the specialist law journals published by the major legal publishers are sustained by contributions from legal academics. The most cursory examination of the law reports reveals a growing reliance by appellate courts upon the work of legal academics in articulating legal doctrine, criticising judgments in which principle has been misunderstood or misapplied, and in formulating emerging legal principles.

Despite all of these commendable achievements there is, in my opinion, one glaring omission that we should strive to overcome. Subject to a few notable exceptions, legal academics have not been prominent mass media contributors to public debate about important legal issues. The daily work of the courts and the legislatures is quite well reported in Australia, but it is not accompanied by informed analysis, expressed in lay terms. Legal academics have the capacity to fill this gap.

The sort of work that I have in mind is extremely challenging because it demands mastery of complex subject matter, first-rate communication skills, a willingness and an ability to respond quickly to emerging issues, and the courage to withstand the criticism of some colleagues who may be dismissive of an academic who writes for the popular media. In spite of these difficulties there are some exceptional role models. George Williams, George Zdenkowski and Garth Nettheim are three legal academics whose clear explanations of complex legal issues have regularly appeared in major newspapers.

At an institutional level we could promote this sort of work by acknowledging that it could contribute to promotion of the Law School. We could encourage associations between media organisations that seek a 'stable' of informed commentators and law schools. Our courts are grappling with ways in which to explain the complexities of their decisions to the general community. Perhaps the Council of Australian Law Deans, together with the Judicial Conference of Australia and the Council of Chief Justices, could arrange for senior legal academics to provide mass media commentary upon important cases at the time judgment is delivered.

Important issues for the next decade, such as a formal statement of reconciliation with indigenous Australians, an Australian republic, an Australian Bill of Rights, the legal consequences of the biotechnology revolution and employment security, need intelligent and accessible mainstream contributions from informed commentators, just as much as they need detailed analysis in law review articles. Without a conscious effort by the leaders of our law schools to encourage legal academics to view accessible contributions to the mainstream media as being of no less importance than articles in referred law journals, we will not be serving our communities as well as we could.

‘Evidence based’ evaluation of the law, legal institutions and law reform proposals

A dominant force in the provision of health services over the past decade has been ‘evidence based’ medicine. The objective of this approach to health care is that evidence, rather than outdated knowledge, hunch or prejudice, should drive the delivery of health services.

In Australia we are only just beginning to see an ‘evidence based’ approach to the formulation of new laws and to the evaluation of existing laws. As few existing lawyers possess the necessary skills to evaluate laws, or law reform proposals, in any sort of scientific way, it is possible that only generational change will bring about the result I advocate. That change, if it is to occur, must start in law schools. We have the capacity to train students, by using academics from other disciplines if necessary, in social science research methods.

There are a number of dimensions to this issue. One concerns the manner in which we tend to make new laws. In many fields we have often relied upon little more than the collective wisdom of influential judges, senior practitioners, and a few academics, coupled with a healthy dash of political expediency, for the content of our laws. Whilst we will never eradicate political expediency, and the value of wisdom can seldom be inflated, we could do much more to gather appropriate empirical evidence before we rush off to change the law.

Another dimension concerns appropriate measuring of the impact of the law. We have a tendency to throw legislation at a social problem, and then assume that the legislation is being complied with and that it is achieving its objectives. Professor Harry Arthurs refers to this phenomenon as ' a central conceit of the legal system'.[47] Arthurs suggests that we must strive for greater understanding of the reasons for 'the gap between law on the books and law in action'[48] .

Two examples from the same fairly narrow field of law illustrate the point I am seeking to make. Both examples emanate from the United States. In that country, as in Australia, mental health laws are controversial and they are often changed in response to public pressure. In the United States a group of scholars from the law and other disciplines started what is referred to as the ‘therapeutic jurisprudence’ movement[49] . They suggested that when changes to mental health laws were being considered, law reform commissions and legislators should have some information before them which revealed the impact which existing laws have had upon people with a mental illness, as well as data concerning the likely impact of proposed changes. Rather than legislating solely from hunch or anecdote, these scholars have argued that there is value in trying to identify the actual experience of existing laws as well as the anticipated effect of proposed amendments.

At the other end of the spectrum, a group of American scholars sought to evaluate whether changes to the law made any difference in practice. They looked at the criteria for civil commitment – the rules of law that determine in what circumstances certain people may become involuntary patients in a psychiatric hospital – and decided to measure whether profound changes to the law achieved anything. Their research in this instance revealed no change in actual day-to-day practices concerning the selection of involuntary patients.[50] Years of passionate debate and lobbying about the wording of the criteria for civil commitment had resulted in no impact at the street level. We could do with much more of this sort of legal research in Australia.

Law schools are blessed with intelligent, industrious and idealistic students. We have hard working, innovative and committed staff. We have served our communities well, especially since the arrival of the ‘second wave’ of law schools a generation ago and the coming of the ‘third wave’ of law schools in the 1990’s. We have opportunities available to us to provide even better service in the opening years of the 21st century.


[1] Australian Law Reform Commission, Managing Justice: A Review of the federal civil justice system (ALRC 89), Sydney, ALRC, 2000 at 117.

[2] ALRC, n1 at 127-128.

[3] ALRC, n1 at 118.

[4] Centre for Legal Education, The Australian Legal Education Yearbook 1999, Sydney, Centre for Legal Education, 2000 at 14-15.

[5] D Pearce, E Campbell, and D Harding, Australian Law Schools: A Discipline Assessment for the Commonwealth Tertiary Education Commission ('The Pearce Report'), Canberra, AGPS, 1987 at 447.

[6] Centre for Legal Education, n4 at 82.

[7] Centre for Legal Education, n4 at 14-15.

[8] S Vignaendra, Australian Law Graduates Career Destinations, Canberra, DEETYA 1998 at 22-23.

[9] Vignaendra, n8 at 24.

[10] These figures are based upon the authors experience as a member of the Committee of Australian Law Deans throughout the 1990s.

[11] P Birks (ed), What are law schools for?, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996.

[12] W Twining, Blackstones Tower: the English Law School, London, Sweet & Maxwell, 1994, at 49.

[13] Pearce et al, n5.

[14] American Bar Association, Legal education and professional development – an educational continuum (Report of the Task Force on Law Schools and the Profession) ('The MacCrate Report'), Chicago, ABA, 1992.

[15] Lord Chancellors Advisory Committee on Legal Education and Conduct, First Report on legal education and training ('The ACLEC Report'), London, HMSO, 1996.

[16] J Goldring, C Sampford, and R Simmonds (eds), New Foundations in Legal Education, Sydney, Cavendish, 1999.

[17] A Amsterdam, 'Clinical Legal Education- A 21st Century Perspective' (1984) 34 Journal of Legal Education 612.

[18] W Twining, 'Taking Facts Seriously' (1984) 34 Journal of Legal Education 22.

[19] J Frank, 'Why not a clinical lawyer-school?' (1933) 81 University of Pennsylvania Law Review 907.

[20] F Gibson, Guide to Clinical Legal Education Courses in Australian Universities, UNSW, Sydney, 1998.

[21] Report of the Committee on Legal Education, Cmnd. 4594, 1971.

[22] This is the title of Professor William Twinings inaugural lecture in 1967 as Professor of Jurisprudence at The Queens University, Belfast. The lecture is published at (1967) 83 Law Quarterly Review 396.

[23] American Bar Association, n14.

[24] Lord Chancellors Advisory Committee on Legal Education and Conduct, n15.

[25] R Hepple, 'The Renewal of the Liberal Law Degree' (1996) 55 Cambridge Law Journal 470 at 471.

[26] ALRC, n1 at 118-119.

[27] ALRC, n1 at 142.

[28] J Giddings, 'A Circle Game: Issues in Australian Clinical Legal Education' [1999] LegEdRev 2; (1999) 10 Legal Education Review 33.

[29] S Rice, A Guide to Implementing Clinical Teaching Method in the Law School Curriculum, Centre for Legal Education, Sydney, 1996.

[30] Rice, n29 at 12

[31] Rice, n29 at 15.

[32] Amsterdam, n17 at 612-613.

[33] Amsterdam, n17 at 613.

[34] Amsterdam, n17 at 613.

[35] Rice, n29 at 12.

[36] Giddings, n28 at 37-38.

[37] A Kronman, The Lost Lawyer, Cambridge (Massachusetts), Harvard University Press, 1993.

[38] See eg. A Goldsmith, 'Heroes or technicians? The moral capacities of tomorrows lawyers' (1996) 14 Journal of Professional Legal Education 1; S Parker, 'Change, Responsibility and the Legal Profession' in S Parker and C Sampford, Legal Ethics and Legal Practice: Contemporary Issues, London, Clarendon Press, 1995 at 73-86; D Weisbrot, Australian Lawyers, Melbourne, Longman Cheshire, 1990.

[39] This figure is achieved by counting the number of centres listed on the Community Legal Centres Index, as at 4 October 2000, on the AustLII web site – www.austlii.edu.au

[40] D Williams, 'Why should all Australians be equal before the law?', Legal Aid Forum – Towards 2010, Canberra, 21 April 1999.

[41] See Health Services Act 1997 (NSW).

[42] L Armytage and S Vignaendra, Career Intentions of Australian Law Students, Sydney, Centre for Legal Education, 1995 at 47-59.

[43] Weisbrot n38 at 137.

[44] G Walker, The Rule of Law: Foundation of Constitutional Democracy, Carlton, Melbourne University Press, 1988.

[45] Walker, n44 at 7.

[46] Redfern Legal Centre, The Law Handbook (7th ed), Sydney, Redfern Legal Centre Publishing, 1999 at iii.

[47] HW Arthurs, 'Half a league onward: the report of the Lord Chancellors Advisory Committee on Legal Education and Conduct' (1997) 31 Law Teacher 1 at 3.

[48] Arthurs, n47 at 3.

[49] See eg. D Wexler and B Winick, Essays in Therapeutic Jurisprudence, Durham (North Carolina), Carolina Academic Press, 1991.

[50] The research is described and evaluated in P Appelbaum, Almost a revolution: mental health law and the limits of change, New York, Oxford University Press, 1994 at 48.


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