Gathering Momentum: Learning from the Past, Responding to the Now, Planning for the Future

How do we build the next generation of lawyer leaders when our students have grown up in an era of strong division, attacks on institutions of government, and the frequent rejection of civil discourse? This year’s conference will focus on the unique challenges our students face as future lawyers and leaders in a highly polarized world.

Today, we and our students are confronted with threats to virtually every norm in the legal and political world –the environment we live in, a free press, election integrity, judicial independence, standards of respectful debate, facts, the rule of law. Our students appear energized and anxious to take this on, but what new tools and opportunities should clinical legal education be providing? What improvements can we make to current teaching techniques? As legal educators, we must equip our students with creativity, judgement, and a toolbox of knowledge, skills, and values that will enable the coming generation to meet these unprecedented challenges.

Accordingly, specific questions we will address in our plenaries, workgroups, and concurrent sessions include:

  1. Who are our students? Why are they in law school? How do we approach teaching students who may feel under attack by our institutions—e.g. students of color, LGBTQ+, undocumented students/families, students with disabilities, politically conservative or liberal students, formerly incarcerated students? How do we support those who are feeling isolated or threatened at school and in society at large while still teaching them the skills they need to address the issues?
     
  2. What are the causes of the current polarization and its impact on our students and us? How do we support and teach our students without causing further harm?
     
  3. Are different skills and values needed to face the challenges of polarization? Or do we shift priorities within the myriad skills and values we currently teach?
     
  4. How do we approach teaching fact development in a time of “alternative facts”?
     
  5. How does civility fit in to our teaching? Do we define civility differently in a polarized and hot political environment? What, if any, are the boundaries of civility in an age when many leaders are breaking prior norms? When might civility run counter to effective advocacy?
     
  6. Are there polarizations and factions within the clinical education community and legal education generally that detract from our students’ learning and that we need to proactively a

Clinical faculty who teach in-house clinics and externship courses are facing profound challenges from outside and inside of our law schools. Many of our clients are in crisis, often due to or exacerbated by policies of federal, state, and local governments. We are grappling with threats to the rule of law and democracy while simultaneously trying to help our students understand these issues. Meanwhile, many of our law schools have experienced a diminished applicant pool, limitations in the supply of post-graduation legal jobs, and tightened budgets. At the same time, clinical faculty are increasingly tasked with finding new and creative ways to provide students with the experiential education they need to meet new ABA requirements, to find employment, and to become responsible and ethical members of the legal profession.

Experiential learning programs must navigate these rocky waters. Clinics and externships hold tremendous potential to enhance student learning while supporting many and varied communities and contributing to the improvement of the legal profession. Yet the times require us to develop strategies for responding to the intensity and variety of our immediate institutional, political, economic, and societal challenges. These strategies will benefit from efforts to learn from the past and to plan effectively for the future.

This conference will explore how we are responding to these current challenges, with a particular focus on the transferable teaching tools and techniques that we are developing in this unique environment. Because clinical faculty seek to teach students legal skills and address client and societal problems through various means—litigation, legislation, externships, community organizing, transactional work, and others—the time is ripe to ask a series of questions. These include: What tools, emerging from different clinical contexts, have been most effective in meeting present challenges and which are transferable to other contexts? Are there ways we might consolidate and combine different clinical approaches to strengthen our impact? What replicable teaching strategies are we using as we respond to present obstacles and crises? What relationships can our clinics develop with social justice movements? How do we adjust to a quickly changing legal landscape and how do we help our students do the same? How are we practicing self-care and helping our students learn balance and self-care in their own lives?

Among the ways that the conference will try to address these pressing questions is by putting them into historical context, exploring lawyers’ and clinicians’ responses to the abuses of power, system failures, and injustices of the past. What lessons can we learn from those past struggles that will help us with our current work? How do we avoid repeating past mistakes? How do we help our students understand and learn from the past as they face the social problems of today and tomorrow?

Finally, the Conference engages a recurring question that presents itself with new urgency in our current climate: how can we be responsive to emergent crises and also committed to a process of longer-range strategic planning?The conference therefore seeks to link our critical responses to current political, legal, and economic developments with processes for future-oriented planning. Evaluating the teaching and lawyering strategies we are using and developing is a key part of identifying changes that may be needed and deciding on next steps to take. How best can we undertake these evaluations? What roles should our clients and students play in a clinic’s evaluation and planning for the future? What barriers to programmatic change do we face and how do we overcome them? And, ultimately, how can we effectively balance the need to be flexible in an era of uncertainty with the need to chart a long-term course—within our clinics, within our institutions, and within the communities we serve?

This conference will offer a range of settings to explore these and other issues and questions. Speakers, plenaries, concurrent sessions, workshops, and scholarly works-in-progress will address them from different viewpoints and teaching models. Working groups organized around participants’ shared interests and expertise will provide spaces to share insights and perspectives. The goal of the conference is to help attendees gather momentum by developing ideas and strategies for teaching and lawyering in these extraordinary times, while learning from lawyering struggles of the past and helping to shape a more just and inclusive future.

Workshop for New Clinical Law School Teachers

This biennial half-day workshop is designed to provide clinical law teachers who are just entering the field or in the early years of their clinical careers with insights and foundational principles for clinical teaching and professional development. The workshop is intended for clinical teachers hired in any position type, including visitor, tenure track, contract, fellow or other kinds of faculty positions.

Workshop sessions will be led and facilitated by a group of inspiring senior and junior faculty chosen for their commitment to clinical legal education, track record of success in their own careers, and diversity of law practice, teaching, and scholarly approaches. Workshop presenters will share best practices, common mistakes, and valuable resources to help attendees develop a tool kit for professional success as clinicians. A variety of topics foundational to clinical teaching will be covered, including: a historical overview of clinical legal education; clinical and externship seminars; classroom case rounds; clinical supervision; clinical models from in-house clinics to externships; scholarship; and navigating the academy. Presenters and attendees will have taught in a variety of clinics including transactional, litigation, community-based, and policy-based programs.

The overall goal of the workshop is to enhance the professional development and teaching confidence of each attendee while connecting new clinicians to peers and experienced clinicians within the broader clinical community.

  1. Address—e.g. clinic vs. externship, transactional vs. litigation, big cases vs. small cases, social justice mission vs. technical lawyering skills? How can we best model integration and teamwork for our students in our own teaching communities?
     
  2. What are the impacts/uses/dangers/advantages of social media in teaching client advocacy in a polarized world?
     
  3. What and how do we teach about our institutions to a generation of students raised during a time when each has been under attack?

This year’s conference has a new format for concurrent sessions, designed to allow for more opportunities to exchange concrete ideas and to mingle and get to know new colleagues. Concurrent session will be shorter—45 minutes each with 15-minute breaks between sessions. There will also be more concurrent sessions. The conference will also offer 20-minute “lightning” sessions.

We will provide opportunities for play and creativity with art and music, to help bring us together and to make new friends and colleagues along the way. We will bring in educators from other disciplines to help us look at our teaching opportunities through different and diverse lenses. We hope this exciting and thought-provoking conference will inspire you to new creative and scholarly heights!

2019 AALS Conference on Clinical Legal Education Planning Committee