|
|
|
Introduction: From Law Student to Lawyer
Clinical legal education is the study of law and lawyering in context. Working with real clients with real problems allows law students to begin the lifelong process of becoming thoughtful, responsible, and reflective lawyers. Students working under the close supervision of their clinical professors are encouraged to identify and pursue their own learning goals while providing essential representation to a wide range of clients. Clinic students test their strengths as they take on increasing responsibility for their clients' cases, knowing that they have the watchful supervision of their experienced teachers yet feeling the profound weight of representing clients in important, and often personal, matters. Students become counselors, mediators, litigators, and educators as they learn to apply the legal knowledge they have gained in law school to their clients' diverse concerns.
Clinic students gain critical skills in communication, information gathering, persuasion, and legal and factual analysis that prepare them to address the multifaceted needs their clients will present. These skills are learned in tandem with an understanding of how an ethical and professionally responsible lawyer represents a client. Students learn to find the right combination of zealous and compassionate advocacy as they strive to solve their clients' pressing dilemmas. These expectations and responsibilities make the clinical experience one of the most useful and exciting features of a student's law school years. Students with diverse career goals, whether public interest, private practice, or government service, gain these critical skills before they launch their legal careers. As a result, clinic students feel more confident that they will be able to shoulder the responsibilities that will come with their chosen paths.
The clinical program at Columbia provides students with two other essential experiences. First, because the clinical professors are deeply engaged in their areas of expertise, they challenge students to learn not only how lawyers currently practice but also how they could practice. Students are encouraged throughout their clinic experience to envision how legal institutions and practices might be reformed and reorganized to provide the best service to clients and the larger society. Second, in the course of undertaking clinical work, students learn to embrace the professional responsibility of community service. Whether they pursue a public-interest career or develop a commitment to pro bono service, clinic students learn to serve clients who are unable to secure representation because of indigency, the unpopularity of their causes, or the complexity of their problems. Columbia clinic alumni have led the profession in providing key representation to such clients.
|
Learning to be a Reflective Practitioner
A good lawyer understands his or her strengths and tries to overcome his or her weaknesses. Columbia Law School's clinics are designed to help students build on those strengths, address their weaknesses, and develop strong conceptions of themselves as lawyers. Many clinics ask students to identify their learning goals, encouraging them to think broadly about those goals. For example, in addition to becoming a better writer, a student may want to learn to be more assertive, more tolerant, or more collaborative as a lawyer. Students are also encouraged to tackle problems, such as procrastination or disorganization, that may undermine their ability to be effective lawyers.
|
|
Columbia clinics are dedicated to benefiting a broad range of societal interests. Helping clients who cannot afford legal representation is a key first step. Whether facing human rights abuses, environmental neglect, or racial discrimination, clients present students with the opportunity to work in local, national, and international forums to address fundamental issues of fairness and justice. Clinic students are faced with legal problems that arise from poverty, racism, inequality, and political tyranny. Columbia’s clinics serve individual clients but also identify and address serious wrongs that need systemic solutions through legislative and policy advocacy, education, and community organization.
|
Understanding Institutions
As administrative and regulatory systems have grown more complex, lawyers must understand how to work within those systems effectively for their clients. Modern legal advocacy involves negotiating for clients with multiple and overlapping systems. Each of Columbia's clinics is taught with the recognition that addressing at least one of these complex systems—such as corrections, environmental regulation, nonprofit governance, or child welfare—will provide students with the basis for understanding other systems that they will encounter in their careers.
|
|
Learning to communicate effectively is an essential lawyering skill. Drafting documents, writing briefs, interviewing and counseling clients, and persuading an adversary or a judge all require practice. The intensive simulation classes of the clinics immerse students into learning those skills collaboratively with classmates, teaching assistants, and the clinic’s supervising professors. Clinic students are critiqued through extensive reviews of their written and oral simulation assignments. The goal is for students to become self-learners—to get to the point where they can look back at their own performances as lawyers and improve their work for the next time.
|
Ethics and Professional Responsibility
Clinical education takes students beyond discussing ethical behavior in the classroom by placing them in professional situations where such behavior is an absolute requirement. In becoming student lawyers, clinic participants gain practical insight into what it means to assume a professional, ethical role. Ethical questions posed in Columbia's clinics include: When representing organizations, how should a lawyer reconcile differences between the needs of the individuals who make up an organization and the organization as a whole? When is it appropriate for a child's lawyer to substitute her judgment for her client's? To what extent should a mediator be responsible for ensuring that an agreement between the parties is fair? In helping a parent to regain custody of her child, should it matter that the client has been incarcerated for a serious crime?
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
