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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).