Lawyering for Justice and the Inevitability of International Human Rights Clinics

Abstract

... Globalization may be taken for granted, but is the U.S. legal profession prepared? A 1996 survey conducted by the American Bar Association (ABA) Section on International Law and Practice found that law schools are responding to the demand for global relevance in legal studies by offering multiple and diverse courses in international and comparative law. ... The theme of the American Association of Law Schools (AALS) 2003 Annual Meeting was Legal Education Engages the World; and the Spring 2003 Meeting of the ABA Section on International Law and Practice was titled, Practicing Law - Inescapably Global. ... The law school clinic is a particularly effective medium for teaching international human rights lawyering. ... In the 1980s and early 1990s, following the important ABA report of the Task Force on Law Schools and the Profession, known as the MacCrate Report after the committee chairperson, clinical legal education experienced a shift away from a justice mission and towards an emphasis on lawyering skills such as interviewing, negotiation, oral advocacy, and brief writing. ... The hybrid model reflects a certain logic from the clinical point of view, particularly if the program embraces the principle that client-centered lawyering is the ideological core of clinical [legal] education. ... But it also reflects the contrast between the client services lawyering model (embodied, for example, in the American University/Washington College of Law Human Rights Clinic) and the human rights advocacy model (embodied, for example, in Yale's Lowenstein Clinic or the Harvard Human Rights Program). ...

Keywords: human rights law, clinical legal education