Best Practices for Legal Education

The Eighth International Clinical Legal Education Conference will be held at Northumbria University Law School, in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, July 7-9, 2010. The Conference will explore the role of clinical legal education in modern law schools.
Professor Paul Maharg (formerly of the University of Strathclyde and now on Northumbria Law School faculty), author of TRANSFORMING LEGAL EDUCATION: LEARNING AND TEACHING THE LAW IN THE EARLY TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY (2007) http://www.transforming.org.uk, will deliver the first keynote, “Sensus Communis: Experiential Learning and the Law School Curriculum.”
There will four streams of sessions running throughout the conferences focusing on issues such as assessment of clinical programs, educating ethical lawyers, assessing student learning, legal clinics and professional skills development, the importance of student practice rules (right of audience), and structuring law school clinics and fieldwork experiences. Abstracts of all of the sessions will be posted on the conference website http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/law/entunit/conferences/ijcleconf_2010/.
Additional plenary sessions include Professors Beryl Blaustone (CUNY Law School). Catherine Klein (Catholic Law School) and Leah Worthham (Catholic Law School) will present the second keynote, “Autonomy, Mastery & Purpose: Structuring Clinical Courses to Enhance These Critical Educational Goals,” and Professor Peter Joy (Washington University in St. Louis) will deliver the final keynote, “Developing Professional Identiy for Lawyers.” Professor David McQuoid-Mason (University of Natal, South Africa) will conduct a special interactive presentation, “The ‘Chicago Seven Trial’ Reloaded: Using the Chicago Seven, Nelson Mandela and Saddam Hussein Trials to Teach about the Role of Lawyers, Judges and Accessed Persons in the Criminal Justice System.”
The keynotes and various sessions promise to explore the many dimensions of the role of clinical legal education in modern law schools, such as educating students about (in)justice, enhancing legal knowledge, developing legal skills, and providing a community service. The conference will focus on the impact that clinical legal education has on the professional development of future lawyers and on the legal systems they help to shape.

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