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13 Clinical L. Rev. 779 (2006-2007)
A Systems Approach to Clinical Legal Education

handle is hein.journals/clinic13 and id is 783 raw text is: A SYSTEMS APPROACH TO CLINICAL LEGAL EDUCATION MEREDITH J. Ross* This article describes the history and development of the systems approach to clinical legal education at the University of Wisconsin's Frank J. Remington Center. Begun as a correctional summer intern- ship in 1964, the Remington Center has focused on providing law students with an observation-based understanding of the ground-level workings of the criminal justice system. This focus on the study of systems has grown out of founder Frank Remington's work in the groundbreaking American Bar Foundation Study of the criminal jus- tice system in the 1950s and 1960s, the intellectual law in action traditions at the University of Wisconsin Law School, and the larger Wisconsin Idea that research at the university should serve state policy. The systems approach to clinical legal education perceives and resolves the historic tension between the skills acquisition and social justice missions of law school clinics in unique ways, and has directed the Remington Center's path from a client population based clinic serving prison inmates to a collection of subject-matter based clinics that both provide service to clients and work on broader sys- temic improvement and reform. I. INTRODUCTION The history of clinical legal education in this country is one of debates-over its goals, its methods, and its case or client selection.1 One of the most fundamental of these debates concerns whether the goal of a law school clinic should be skills acquisition or social jus- tice. On one side of this debate stand the proponents of skills acquisi- * Clinical Professor of Law, University of Wisconsin Law School, and Director of the Frank J. Remington Center. This article is a much-modified version of a paper that I presented at the Sixth International Conference on Clinical Legal Education at Lake Ar- rowhead, California, in October of 2005. I would like to thank all who commented on that presentation. I would also like to thank members of the University of Wisconsin Law School's faculty and staff who commented on a works-in-progress talk that I presented at the Law School's Big Ideas Caf in August of 2006. I would especially like to thank Walter Dickey for his very thoughtful contributions to this article. Most of all, I would like to thank the faculty, staff, students, and clients of the Remington Center, who make it a pleasure to go to work every day. 1 For an excellent overview of the history of clinical legal education in this country, see Margaret Martin Barry, Jon C. Dubin, & Peter A. Joy, Clinical Education for the Millen- nium: The Third Wave, 7 CLIN. L. REV. 1 (2000), especially the sources cited in n. 6. An older but still useful historical summary can be found in George S. Grossman, Clin. Legal Education: History and Diagnosis, 26 J. LEGAL EDUC. 162 (1973-74).

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