What happened to law clinics in lockdown?

The disruption caused by Covid-19 has had far reaching impacts and required all of us to adapt to life’s challenges under lockdown. University law clinics are no exception and law academics and clinic supervisors have had to act fast and think creatively to keep their clinical programmes running.

As I discussed in a recent blog, clinical legal education provides opportunities for their law students to provide much needed legal advice, education and guidance to members of the public. This can be through provision of pro bono advice clinics, legal education workshops in local schools, prisons and community settings and by supporting litigants without professional representation during court proceedings. Making these types of engagements work during a period of social distancing isn’t easy and inevitably involves some creative use of online platforms.

The Open Justice Centre has been experimenting with online methods to deliver clinical legal education since it launched Justice in Action in 2017. We have dabbled in virtual reality, online advice clinics, digital team building and mobile apps for public legal education. Given this experience we were invited to guest edit a special Covid edition of the International Journal of Clinical Legal Education, to investigate how law teachers have responded the challenge of keeping their law clinics running during the pandemic.

We were delighted to receive contributions from law teachers running CLE programmes in the UK, USA and India. The difficulties discussed are significant, but all the papers demonstrate how the creative solutions adopted point to new pathways for clinics to engage with their communities. So although 2020 may have been a write off for countless summer holidays, weddings, concerts, plays and pub visits there is some comfort to be had in the progress that has been made in making legal education more innovative and accessible than could have been hoped for twelve months ago.

Hugh Mc Faul Hugh McFaul