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28 Wash. U. J. L. & Pol'y 111 (2008)
Access to Justice and the Global Clinical Movement

handle is hein.journals/wajlp28 and id is 113 raw text is: Access to Justice and the Global Clinical Movement Frank S. Bloch* INTRODUCTION Access to justice is widely accepted as a central component of clinical legal education in the United States and in many other countries around the world.1 Indeed, this is inherent in the clinical methodology, which seeks to prepare students for the practice of law as competent and professionally responsible lawyers while delivering legal services and promoting social justice.2 Clinical programs worldwide place students face to face with what are often glaring inequalities in access to justice; in effect, legal systems lacking accessibility to justice provide the material around which a clinical curriculum for empowering future lawyers committed to full access for all can be built. This Article takes up the question of clinical legal education's commitment to access to justice from a global perspective and argues * Professor of Law and Director of the Social Justice Program, Vanderbilt University Law School. Special thanks to Supriya Routh, Vanderbilt-Fulbright Fellow at Vanderbilt Law School 2007-08 and Lecturer-in-Law at W.B. National University of Juridical Sciences, kolkata, India, for research assistance and comments on this Article. 1. In this context, I mean access to justice in the sense of equal access for all, and especially for those groups of persons for whom access is denied due to economic or other disadvantaged status. Cf Maryellen Fullerton, Introduction to Symposium on Enforcing Judgments Abroad: The Global Challenge, 24 BROOK. J. INT'L L. 1, 5 (1998) (As the global economy expands and increasingly renders international boundaries obsolete, there will be an increased desire for legal mechanisms that render international boundaries obsolete when they impede the access to justice for litigants.). There is a rich literature documenting the important role that law schools can play in assuring greater access to law and the legal system through clinical programs. See, e.g., Stephen Wizner & Jane Aiken, Teaching and Doing: The Role of Law School Clinics in Enhancing Access to Justice, 73 FORDHAM L. REV. 997 (2004). See also Peter A. Joy & Charles D. Weisselberg, Access to Justice, Academic Freedom, Political Interference: A Clinical Program Under Siege, 4 CLINICAL L. REV. 531 (1998). 2. As discussed infra Part II, there is no single global clinical methodology; incorporating the delivery of legal services and promoting social justice, however, goes to the heart of the clinical dimension of the global clinical movement.

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