IS SOCIAL JUSTICE STILL RELEVANT

Abstract: Social justice remains relevant in teaching clinical legal education. The clinical legal education model teaches the basics of lawyering not otherwise taught in law school: a practical understanding of the practice of law, how to deal with difficult legal ethics issues, professional skills, and the doctrines that matter. Clinical education also teaches a more personal lesson; it instructs law students to question the machinery of society, instills socially responsible values, and teaches students to address social inequities. These latter lessons all stem from the social justice mission of clinical legal education. While times may have changed since the movement's beginnings in the 1960s and '70s, and clinical professors have become further entrenched in academia, the social justice mission continues to drive student learning and instill values not otherwise taught in law schools. As clinics evolve to meet the future demands of law schools and students, they should not eschew their social justice roots, but rather expand the range of educational experiences while continuing to serve under- privileged clients through new and innovative clinics.INTRODUCTIONFrom the beginning of clinical legal education, one central goal has been to engage law students in the pursuit of social justice through the provision of legal assistance to the poor and others who lacked access to legal services.1 Clinical pedagogy is designed around four tenets. It teaches students to employ legal knowledge, theory, and skills to meet individual and social needs; exposes students to the ways in which the law (and lawyers) can both advance and subvert the achievement of social justice and public welfare; instills in students good professional values; and provides supervised opportunities for students-acting in the role of lawyers-to learn to exercise judgment in a professionally competent, ethical, and socially responsible manner.2Clinical education plays a significant role in exposing students to social and economic injustice. It accomplishes this by offering students well-taught and well-supervised opportunities to provide legal services to low-income and other underserved individuals, groups, and communities. Law students learn about their clients' social and economic circumstances first-hand, not simply through studying appellate court decisions, legislation, social policy, and statistics.3Part I of this Article locates the origins of clinical legal education in the social justice movements of the 1960s and '70s. In Part II, I describe my own journey from being a poverty lawyer at a civil legal services organization to a clinical professor at Yale Law School. Part III outlines what I believe are some of the objectives of clinical legal education in light of its social justice origins. Finally, Part IV posits that social justice remains relevant in clinical legal education.I. THE SOCIAL JUSTICE ROOTS OF CLINICAL LEGAL EDUCATIONToward the end of the tumultuous decade of the 1960s and in the early years of the 1970s, social and political forces in America pushed open the doors of American law schools for the entry of clinical legal education.4 Students entering law schools at that time were exposed to-if not participants in-demonstrations, sit-ins, freedom rides, or other political actions protesting the Vietnam War and supporting the Civil Rights Movement, the War on Poverty, women's rights, the rights of people with disabilities, and other movements for social justice and change.5 Not only had they seen and been part of the social activism swirling around them, they had witnessed the participation of activist lawyers in struggles for social justice.6 This struggle occurred around the same time as the inauguration of both the War on Poverty and federally- funded legal services.7These students were critical of the education offered by their law schools.8 They believed that law schools supported and perpetuated an unjust status quo. …