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22 Penn St. Int'l L. Rev. 421 (2003-2004)
Training for Justice: The Global Reach of Clinical Legal Education

handle is hein.journals/psilr22 and id is 431 raw text is: Training for Justice: The Global Reach of
Clinical Legal Education
Richard J. Wilson*
In the United States, clinical legal education has become an integral
component of the curriculum at virtually all law schools. Within the last
five years, the number of persons identifying themselves as clinical
professors rose above 1,800.1 Clinical teachers can proudly assert that
clinical legal education is one of the most significant and successful
pedagogical developments since Langdell's case method at the beginning
of the Twentieth Century.
Clinical legal education has also taken firm root outside the United
States as well. In fact, as early as 1901 clinical legal education was
proposed by a Russian professor, Alexander Lyublinsky, who believed
that a law school clinical component could be modeled on medical
training. This was sixteen years before the earliest proposals for clinics
appeared in the United States.2 In some cases, particularly in Latin
America and India during the late 1960s and early 1970s, law school
clinics began operation at virtually the same time clinical education
* Richard Wilson is Professor of Law and Director of the International Human
Rights Law Clinic at American University's Washington College of Law. He has worked
as a consultant to or teacher in law school clinical programs in Mexico, El Salvador,
Nicaragua, Guatemala, Panama, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, South
Africa, Slovakia, Lithuania, Czech Republic, Georgia, Turkey, Ukraine and China. He
has taught in regional clinical training programs as a consultant to the Soros-funded
programs in Central and Eastern Europe, AID and UNHCR. He has also written
extensively on clinical legal education and access to justice issues.
1. Prof. David Chavkin, my faculty colleague who served faithfully as custodian of
a clinical program and faculty database for several years, provided this useful
information.
2. Clinical Legal Education: Forming the Next Generation of Lawyers, in
PURSUING THE PUBLIC INTEREST: A HANDBOOK FOR LEGAL PROFESSIONALS AND ACTIVISTS
257, 261 (Edwin Rekosh et al. eds., 2001). The earliest academic reference in the United
States is to William V. Rowe, Legal Clinics and Better Trained Lawyers-A Necessity,
11 ILL. L. REV. 591, 591 (1917). One of the most cited references for the conceptual
origins of clinical legal education in the United States comes from the era of the Legal
Realists. Jerome Frank, Why Not a Clinical Lawyer-School?, 81 U. PA. L. REV. 907
(1933).

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