Suchergebnisse

The special issue of this journal is about problematizing assessment. However, in this article I want to start further back and problematize what is meant by competence. I think it is fair to say that when law clinicians speak about assessing competence they usually have in mind the assessment of skills. By contrast, I will argue that competence goes well beyond skills, at least if we understand skills in the narrow sense of technical legal skills, and includes in addition a values dimension. Moreover, if this dimension is added to the notion of skills, and clinical legal education (CLE) is expanded to include an understanding of how lawyers' skills are used, for whom and to what end, it might help reverse the traditional and still continuing antipathy in many law schools to CLE. For those like myself, who see law clinics as more about contributing to social justice than legal education (Nicolson 2006), the reluctance to embrace CLE is rooted (rightly or wrongly) in a political and moral stance. But for most academics, the antipathy - or, at best, apathy - towards CLE might be more to do with its association with skills training and the consequent assumption that it is unintellectual, unfit for the lofty heights of a liberal legal education and thus best left for the grubby business of preparing lawyers for practice (see eg Bradney 1995, 2003, Brownsword, 1999; Guth & Ashford, 2014).

The special issue of this journal is about problematizing assessment. However, in this article I want to start further back and problematize what is meant by competence. I think it is fair to say that when law clinicians speak about assessing competence they usually have in mind the assessment of skills. By contrast, I will argue that competence goes well beyond skills, at least if we understand skills in the narrow sense of technical legal skills, and includes in addition a values dimension. Moreover, if this dimension is added to the notion of skills, and clinical legal education (CLE) is expanded to include an understanding of how lawyers' skills are used, for whom and to what end, it might help reverse the traditional and still continuing antipathy in many law schools to CLE. For those like myself, who see law clinics as more about contributing to social justice than legal education, the reluctance to embrace CLE is rooted (rightly or wrongly) in a political and moral stance. But for most academics, the antipathy - or, at best, apathy - towards CLE might be more to do with its association with skills training and the consequent assumption that it is unintellectual, unfit for the lofty heights of a liberal legal education and thus best left for the grubby business of preparing lawyers for practice.To the extent that CLE is confined to training students in legal skills, I have some sympathy with this view, though it's questionable whether skills training is any less intellectual than the sort of repetitive, decontextualised and atheoretical teaching of black-letter law which often passes for a liberal legal education. However, in a recent article, I joined a number of others who have argued that there is nothing necessarily anti-intellectual about a focus on practice in a liberal legal education. Thus, like Goldsmith and Bamford, I do not see engagement with practice in purely vocational or technocratic terms, but as providing opportunities for connecting the "aspirations of law students with professional ideals (justice, service, fairness) and the goals of a university-based education".In this article, I first flesh out this argument and justify the focus on ethical as well as skills competence in clinical legal education. I then turn from problematizing the concept of competence per se to problematizing its assessment. This will be done via a critical analysis of the forms of assessment used in the clinical programme offered in the University of Strathclyde Law Clinic. These include the assessment of simulated training exercises, work on actual cases, reflective essays on aspects of law, legal ethics and law's justice and reflective diaries on all aspects of clinical experience. Drawing on my experience with these different forms of assessment, I will consider their comparative merits in contributing to the two classic goals of clinic assessment, namely reliability – whether the scores obtained from an assessment are reproducible - and validity - whether the assessment does in fact measure what it is intended to measure. Finally, drawing on the assessment regimes in the relevant clinical classes, I will seek to provide some food for thought about alternative means of assessing clinical teaching.

Professional Legal Ethics: Critical Interrogations provides the first in-depth analysis and sustained critique of the ethics of English and Welsh lawyers. Drawing on a wide variety of disciplines, it argues that professional legal ethics has failed to deliver an approach which requires lawyers actively to engage with the ethical issues raised by legal practice. Through an analysis of the context of legal practice and the core ethical issues facing lawyers,the authors locate this failure in the influence of liberalism and formalism, which leads lawyers to undermine the very values of human dignity and autonomy which they are meant to serve and to overlook the impact their actions might have on third parties, the wider community and the environment By contrast,the authors propose a contextual approach to individual ethical decision-making and outline a range of practical reforms aimed at encouraging a more ethical legal profession.

Why does a revolutionary theatre method developed in the 1960s and 1970s by Brazilian intellectual and activist Augusto Boal belong in clinical legal education? Use of the transformative Forum Theatre method can greatly enhance legal education. Boal, a colleague and disciple of Paulo Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed), developed Forum Theatre as a democratic, participatory, and collaborative production between the actors and the audience, to revolutionize traditional sit-and-watch theatre. Spectators in the audience become spect-actors, halt the oppressive element in a scenario, take the place of the actors, and eliminate oppression. The over-arching goal of Forum Theatre is to illuminate and achieve social justice. Because of the frequent use of role-playing methodologies in clinical legal education, and its client-centered approach to legal representation, law school clinics are an ideal laboratory to develop and explore Forum Theatre as an instructional exercise. Students learn to interrupt oppression, to observe and check their own paternalistic instincts, to empower vulnerable clients, and to transform the legal encounter into one that is more ethical and just. Three scripts the authors have developed and used in clinical training are included as an Appendix.