The Use of Therapeutic Jurisprudence in Law School Clinical Education: Transforming the Criminal Law Clinic

Abstract

This article describes how therapeutic jurisprudence, and the therapeutic jurisprudence/preventive law model, can be imported into legal education and practice. Although the approach can (and does) find application in a broad spectrum of legal areas, the present article focuses on the criminal law clinic and on training future criminal lawyers with an expanded professional role: one that explicitly adds an ethic of care and considerations of rehabilitation. As such, it brings an interdisciplinary perspective into clinics and law practice, with particular emphasis on insights and techniques drawn from psychology, criminology, and social work. The article explores a therapeutic jurisprudence framework for thinking about criminal law competencies, and illustrates the explicit use of the expanded professional role in the area of sentencing, in juvenile parole revocation proceedings, and in a tribal reentry court project.

Keywords: clinical legal education, therapeutic jurisprudence, criminal law