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92 Tul. L. Rev. 547 (2017-2018)

handle is hein.journals/tulr92 and id is 587 raw text is: TULANE LAW REVIEW VOL. 92 FEBRUARY 2018 No. 3 Measuring Law School Clinics Colleen E Shanahan,* Jeffrey Selbin,** Alyx Mark,*** and Anna E. Carpenter**** Legal education reformers have long argued that law school clinics address two related needs: first, clinics teach students to be lawyers; and second, clinics serve low-income clients. In clinics, so the argument goes, law students working under the close supervision offaculty members learn the requisite skills to be good practitioners and professionals. In turn, clinical law students serve clients with civil and criminal justice needs that would otherwise go unmet. Though we have these laudable teaching and service goals--and a vast literature describing the role of clinics in both the teaching and service dimensions-we have scant empirical evidence about whether and how clinics achieve these goals. We know from studies that law students value clinics, but do clinics prepare them to be lawyers? We also know from surveys that clinics provide hundreds of thousands of hours offree legal aid in low-income communities, but how well do clinic students serve clients? These are big questions across a complex field and set of practices that cannot be answered by a single study. Nevertheless, we report here findings from a large data set of cases that shed some light on the teaching-service promise of law school clinics. Analyzing thousands of unemployment insurance cases involving diferent types of representation, we are able to compare clinical law students' use of legal procedures and outcomes to those of experienced attorneys in cases in the same court. We find that clinical law students behave very similarly to practicing attorneys in their use of legal procedures. Their clients also experience very similar case outcomes to clients of practicing attorneys. Though further research is needed on the impact of law school clinics in the teaching and service dimensions, our findings are consistent with claims that law school C 2018 Colleen F. Shanahan, Jeffrey Selbin, Alyx Mark, and Anna E. Carpenter. * Colleen F. Shanahan is Associate Clinical Professor of Law and Director of Justice Lab at the Sheller Center for Social Justice, Temple University Beasley School of Law. ** Jeffrey Selbin is Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the Policy Advocacy Clinic at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. *** Alyx Mark is Assistant Professor of Political Science at North Central College and a Visiting Scholar at the American Bar Foundation. **** Anna E. Carpenter is Associate Clinical Professor of Law and Director, Lobeck Taylor Community Advocacy Clinic, at The University of Tulsa College of Law. 547

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