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The first wave of clinical legal education in the United States began in the early part of the 20th century, shortly after the casebook method emerged in the late 1890s as a popular route to preparing for a career in law. The casebook method's emphases on appellate judicial decisions and the Socratic method as the means to teach the skill of legal analysis were a departure from the three prevailing methods of American legal education in the 19th century: the applied skills training method inherent in the apprenticeship system; the general education approach of the prevailing European legal educational model, which was adopted by some colleges and universities in the United States; and an analytical and systematized approach to the law as interconnected rational principles, taught primarily through lectures at proprietary law schools. While the casebook method was gaining wide acceptance, law students at several law schools in the late 1890s and early 1900s established volunteer, non-credit "legal dispensaries" or legal aid bureaus to provide hands-on opportunities to learn and practice lawyering skills and legal analysis, and also to serve a social justice mission by providing legal assistance to those unable to hire attorneys.
With the changes of legal education in United States at the beginning of the 20th century came the need for practical education as opposed to book-learning. Previously, a young law school graduates received their "clinical experience" in pupillage, in which they were an apprentice to an established lawyer. The same system was used for medical students; but at the start of the 1910s hospital clinics were already well established institutions of medical education.
Especially after four-year law courses were established in American law schools (such as Northwestern University, the University of California, and Yale), the need for practical education became urgent. Legal aid clinics were meant to affiliate with already established legal aid societies. They would have between ten and fifty positions (depending on the size of the community), each having a stipend equal to that usually paid in local law offices. A Professor of Practice was in charge of the young lawyers, and the professor would have a staff of specialists available in particular branches of law. The clinics were meant to provide maximum educational value.
Northwestern Law School in Chicago has one of the oldest of the legal clinics, it being first established in 1910. In the USA clinics were set up partly because of the absence of a formal trainee or apprenticeship position within the legal profession. Students are admitted to practice immediately on passing the bar exams.
By 1915 the plan to establish such law clinics was devised and approved by the Chicago Bar Association. Approval by the New York Bar Association soon followed. The committee's chairman, W. V. Rowe, set forth the plan in the Illinois Law Review:
Every large city and every university town where is a law school were supposed to have student legal aid offices; if the town was too small to supply either "medical or a legal hospital" with sufficient variety of cases, then this part of the law-school was supposed to be carried on in he nearest metropolis.In 1921, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching funded a study on legal education, commonly called the "Reed Report" after its non-lawyer author, Alfred Z. Reed. The Reed Report identified three components necessary to prepare students for the practice of law: general education, theoretical knowledge of the law, and practical skills training. To satisfy the requirement of a general education component, the Reed Report called for at least two years of pre-law college training – a proposal the ABA promoted, starting in 1921. At that time, not a single state required a university-based law school degree as a precondition for admission to the bar, proprietary law schools were still prevalent, and apprenticeships still provided the basic legal training for many entering the legal profession. In the wake of Rowe's early efforts to integrate clinical education into the law school curriculum, and the Reed Report's call for practical skills training, John Bradway and Jerome Frank pioneered the cause of clinical legal education methodology in the 1920s through the 1940s, advocating an in-house clinic as an essential component of sound legal education. Yet, despite the efforts of Bradway and Frank, only a handful of law schools instituted in-house clinical courses through the first half of the 20th century.
In spite of there being old examples, clinical education as recognised today in the USA really began in the 1960s. It spread rapidly. By 1973 of the 147 US Law Schools 125 reported having some form of clinical education. Many of these benefited from Ford Foundation monies on condition that they supplied free poverty law advice. These monies came to an end in 1979, and this led to a re-evaluation and re-orientation of the American programmes.
Read more about this topic: Legal Clinic, Background
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