In every society some portion of the population cannot afford professional legal representation, though they desperately need the advocacy of a good lawyer. Clinic students can make a significant, if only partial, contribution to filling this gap. Lawyers in many Central and Eastern European countries are overwhelmed by demand for their services and unable to devote proper attention to clients who cannot pay for their services.
Legal clinics can contribute to meeting this need, particularly in those cases that do not present a level of complexity requiring an experienced lawyer. Moreover, legal clinics can often do more for their indigent clients than law firms can. People often go there to seek legal advice about a problem that may be a result of a number of other social and legal problems that clients may not even want to acknowledge. Students learn to deal with some of the other needs of their clients and provide them with more than just the legal advice sought. Clinic students are able to directly assist only a small portion of all those individuals who might need free legal services. However, as is borne out from the experience of clinics in many countries, students who have been able to use their knowledge of law to help those in need often choose to continue to work for the public good. Clinics often produce a pool of young lawyers who will directly address society’s need for free or low-cost legal consultation and representation.
In many of the emerging democracies in the region, where a majority of people live in poverty, it is tempting for clinic administrators to look to clinics as a means of meeting a significant portion of the population’s need for legal services. Nevertheless, university legal clinics will always have to balance the interest of serving underrepresented clients with the educational goals of the clinic. This balancing will often mean taking fewer cases in order to have sufficient time to provide the supervision, evaluation, and feedback that clinical legal education requires.
Sensitizing students to social issues.
In a profession that lures young lawyers toward lucrative careers, clinics show students the tangible advantages of legal careers devoted to empowering poorer members of society and bringing the benefits and protections of the law to those who traditionally have had little access to them.
Perhaps one of the most valuable products of clinical education is that young lawyers-to-be feel the deep satisfaction that results from providing free legal assistance to people in need. Clinic students learn not only about the law, but also about its impact on life. By bringing law to life through the experience of clients in need, law clinics can be a crucial force in the improvement of human rights and the development of the rule of law.
Clinical legal education programs are a mechanism for training law students and helping them to understand the ethical, professional, and practical problems faced by
practicing lawyers. Exposing law students to real-world experiences, within the context of a clinical legal education program, can result in a future talent pool for the public interest legal community.
Assisting practicing lawyers and legal organizations.
Legal clinics can also help the practicing bar by relieving attorneys of cases that demand too much time for too little reward. Student lawyers can learn from these cases. Likewise, clinics might take on a small number of less-complicated cases referred by human rights groups, leaving those groups the time and resources to focus on cases whose outcomes might affect larger policy issues.
In many countries with clinical legal education programs, practitioners choose to become involved in clinical legal education programs by providing an “internship” or apprenticeship opportunity with their organization or firm. They can also directly supervise students in a university-based clinic or serve as outside mentors whom the students can consult regarding specific issues. In such situations, students profit from a practitioner’s expertise and perspective, which may be different from that of the clinical professor. In turn, the experienced attorney or public interest organization receives low-cost labor and may benefit from being able to influence and educate bright young students who will later join the ranks of legal professionals better prepared for practice.
Enhancing the legal reform process.
In the societies of Central and Eastern Europe, many viewed laws under the socialist legal order as tools of arbitrary power. Large portions of the populations of the region felt alienated and cut off from the benefits and protections of their own laws, even though they could be punished or restricted by those laws. As a result, to this day a pervasive attitude of fear, estrangement, and mistrust toward the legal system discourages many citizens from seeking the legal help they need.
By assisting individuals in their relationships with state and local administration, clinics improve the legal consciousness of administrators, bureaucrats, and citizens alike.
Students’ assistance and advice encourage citizens to pursue their rights through
administrative procedures. Students’ involvement in facilitating communication between citizens and governmental entities also functions as a type of civil control over the administration and encourages officials to apply the laws in good faith.
Clinical legal education may also play a valuable role in promoting legal reform and furthering respect for the rule of law.
Clinical students spend time studying particular legal provisions, applying such provisions in specific cases, and communicating with administrative agencies and law enforcement offices. The students’ experience may bring to the attention of academia some of the discrepancies between theory and practice or shortcomings of the law that might otherwise go unnoticed. Stimulating professors’ interest in these issues may also trigger academic discussion and encourage efforts to change judicial or administrative practices, or even to achieve legislative reform.
Teaching ethics and professional responsibility.
Working as a lawyer in the protected environment of the university-based clinic helps students to understand the implications of being practicing lawyers. The clinic serves as a forum for exploring and resolving ethical dilemmas under the supervision of teaching faculty, after which students are better equipped to make difficult
decisions and live with the consequences. Clinics thus infuse legal education with a strong sense of responsibility and professional ethics.
As students handle their cases from beginning to end, they see the results of their decision making and work. Through clinical training, students assume responsibility for matters of great importance to their clients, and they gain the opportunity to incorporate the legal profession’s ethical standards into their practice routine during its formative stages.
Working with the law in real-world situations allows students to discover the values critical to effective legal systems, and it encourages their commitment to the rule of law, justice, fairness, and high ethical standards. Indeed, learning about ethics on the basis of actual cases is far more effective than learning the abstract principles alone. Over the long term, clinics can help to develop students’ understanding and appreciation of strategic
considerations with the interrelationship of issues of professional responsibility and ethics.
Improving the system of legal education.
Clinical legal education may have a positive impact on the quality of education in the law school generally. Meeting real clients and discussing real problems can stimulate students’ interest in legal issues, encouraging them to become more proactive and to pursue their studies more diligently. Trying to solve real cases instead of simply memorizing legal rules helps develop students’ critical thinking, a skill that they will use in their other law school courses.
Clinical legal education can also bring students’ practical experience under the
supervision of law school professors. The system currently in place in Central and Eastern Europe provides an opportunity for students to work with practicing lawyers in the
community prior to or just after graduating from the university. The system is widely criticized as inefficient because it places all responsibility for instructing and supervising students on practicing lawyers, judges, or prosecutors, who are most often overburdened with other work. The law schools play an insignificant role, or none at all. Introducing legal clinics into the law school curriculum offers an alternative form of instruction by providing practical education designed and implemented by law school professors to meet the needs of their students.
Finally, clinical education affords students an opportunity to consider the kind of legal work they would like to undertake in the future—or even whether they want to be a lawyer at all, at a point in their education that allows them to adjust their studies accordingly.
In putting their education to the test in a clinic setting, they discover their strengths and weaknesses before finishing their legal studies. Consequently, students are able to work with their teachers on converting those weaknesses into strengths. The understanding of their professional qualities versus the demands of the profession aids students in determining which areas of legal practice suit them best before they commit themselves to a specific field of law.
SIGNIFICANCE
Law is the cement of society and an essential medium of change. The significance of legal education in a democratic society cannot be over-emphasized. A knowledge of law increases one's understanding of public affairs. Its study promotes accuracy of the
expression, facility in arguments and skill in interpreting the written words, as well as some understanding of social values.
It is pivotal duty of everyone to know the law. Ignorance of law is not innocence but a sin which cannot be excused . Thus, legal education is imperative not only to produce good lawyers but also to create cultured law abiding citizens, who are inculcated with concepts of human values and human rights.
Legal profession is objectively in the position of producing Statesmen. This is due to two reasons
(1) Lawyers belong to an independent profession. They are not subordinate to the government or to anyone else, and
(2) They are directly in contact with society in its entirety as they have to deal with all kinds of problems of people from all sections of society, unlike say, doctors who are confined to technical problems. Hence lawyers are the people who are most conversant
with the problems of society as a whole.
A well administered and socially relevant legal education is a sine qua non for a proper dispensation of justice. Giving legal education a human face would create cultured law abiding citizens who are able to serve as professionals and not merely as business men.
The quality and standard of legal education acquired at the law school is reflected through the standard of Bar and Bench and consequently affects the legal system. The primary focus of law schools should be to identify the various skills that define a lawyer and then train and equip its students with requirements of the field of law.