An Evolving Vision for Experiential Education: The Immigrant Rights Clinic at the University of California, Irvine School of Law
10 U.C. IRVINE L. REV. 427 (2020)
27 Pages Posted: 16 Jul 2020
Date Written: July 15, 2020
Abstract
Over the past decade, the University of California, Irvine School of Law (“UCI Law”) has developed a robust program of experiential education, including a requirement (and a guarantee) that nearly all students will have the opportunity to participate in a core clinic before they graduate. But there is a risk that, with the decision to make participation in clinics a universal part of the UCI Law experience, our program could lose some of the benefits of clinical legal education’s outsider tradition. In this piece, I offer some of my own reflections co-directing the Immigrant Rights Clinic since 2013 and describe several paradigmatic projects from our student docket. I rely on these reflections to map out four competencies, or “ethoses,” which we can offer students across the student body that embrace—rather than eclipse—the disruptive potential of clinical legal education.
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