ARTICLES

1. NR Madhava Menon: The guiding light for global clinical legal education
Frank S. Bloch
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The late NR Madhava Menon, known widely as ‘the father of modern legal education in India’, was also a leading voice for global legal education reform by championing ‘socially relevant legal education’ through clinical legal education throughout the world. This article concentrates on his seminal role in the founding of the Global Alliance for Justice Education (GAJE) and the crafting of its mission statement. Drawing on a number of key moments in Dr Menon’s lifelong dedication to the twin causes of legal education and social justice, it highlights how he brought an international perspective to his critical work on legal education reform in India by enlisting international collaborators, how he motivated international colleagues to bring similar reforms to their countries, and how he mentored new generations of legal educators in what has become a true global clinical movement. The article focuses specifically on how the guiding principles of GAJE’s inaugural conference, which Dr Menon co-chaired in 1999, reflect his vision of global clinical legal education that continues to guide GAJE and the global clinical movement today.
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2. A tribute and a legacy: Clinical legal education and the bountiful harvest
Richard Grimes
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The pioneering work of Madhava Menon is well known to many. This article pays tribute to his memory and briefly examines what he has left behind in terms of changes to the way we think of, design, and deliver legal education across the world. The concepts that Dr Menon and others helped to sow and propagate are now blooming across the world. Before his untimely passing, he would have seen some of the fruits of such labour in his own country and beyond, but the legacy is much more than this. There is now a global movement of clinical legal education practitioners who are sustaining and developing the ideas and models that this legacy bequeathed. Using a mix of personal anecdotes and reference to relevant published works, this article explores the relevant detail and concludes that clinical legal education is in safe, competent, and creative hands.
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3. Clinic in the times of COVID19
Jeff Giddings
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This article considers the challenges faced by clinical legal education programmes in responding effectively to the COVID19 pandemic. Client needs are different and more acute. They also need to be balanced with the safety of students and staff. Services will need to be delivered remotely. The article considers some of the key legal issues generated by the pandemic, highlighting the need for clinics and other legal service providers to respond to these emerging legal and related needs. In responding, clinics will be best served by adhering to their pedagogical principles in the design of new services and in reshaping existing practices. This should enable clinical programmes to ensure that the experience of students remains distinctive, albeit different. The experience of the Monash Clinical Program is provided to demonstrate the value of using a clinical best practices framework to guide the responses to the challenges generated by COVID19. Research related to clinical best practices undertaken as part of the planning for implementation of the Monash Clinical Guarantee has shaped the programme’s response to COVID19. The article then considers a range of issues generated by the move to virtual delivery of client services and the clinic’s teaching programme. The article concludes with contemplation of how clinical programmes can best plan for ‘the new normal’ that will present itself after the pandemic.

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4. Transnational law as a framework for law clinics
Sital Kalantry & Rachael Hancock
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As the law becomes increasingly globalised and online education is increasingly emphasised, clinical legal education presents new opportunities for transnational collaboration. With more law schools introducing global clinical experiences into their curriculum, clinicians, students, clients, and practitioners are facing a host of new questions, challenges, and obstacles. These challenges are practical, logistical, ethical, and cultural. As research has found, finding a means of addressing these issues in ways that advance social justice has proven difficult. Striking a balance between client service and student learning, navigating relationships between different learning institutions, and setting ambitious but attainable goals are important elements of any clinic, but become increasingly vital for the success of a transnational clinical programme. Despite these obstacles and foundational questions, we argue that transnational clinical education presents benefits to all parties involved. This article assesses the methods, strengths, weaknesses, and outcomes of a collaboration between Cornell Law School’s Human Rights Clinic and National Law University (NLU), Delhi, that took place in 2017. This clinic focused on advocacy in favour of lifting bans on compensated surrogacy in both India and New York, culminating in two reports, an event at the United Nations, and testimony before the New York State Assembly. Twelve students from Cornell Law School and eight students from NLU, Delhi met weekly in a ‘global classroom’ equipped with video and chat functions to discuss the goals of the clinic, background readings, and their respective projects within the clinic. Eight students from Ithaca travelled to Delhi for eight days, conducting interviews and engaging in fact-finding with NLU, Delhi students. Together, students and clinicians from Cornell Law School and NLU, Delhi authored two reports, one focused on the U.S., and one focused on India, which were disseminated to each country’s governments. Our reflections on this programme are meant to serve as a learning experience for other clinicians considering implementing a transnational clinical legal education opportunity.
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5. Advancing justice interests and human rights of vulnerable groups through clinical legal education
Marium Jabyn
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Access to justice rights of vulnerable groups in the Maldives is significantly affected due to lack of information, awareness, accessibility, and legal representation. The provision of State-funded legal aid is only available in serious criminal cases, and free legal services provided by individual lawyers and civil society organisations are limited and scattered. Out of 20, only a handful of atolls in the Maldives have resident lawyers offering legal services. Thus, as a country with over 200 inhabited islands, key vulnerable groups such as women and children face serious challenges in attaining legal services and access to the system. This article emphasises the broader objectives of legal education and argues that by pursuing social justice goals and advancing the human rights of vulnerable groups in the Maldives, university law clinics can benefit legal education and the society at large.
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6. CLR, ‘rebellious lawyering’, and justice education: A few lessons from Bangladesh
Mizanur Rahman
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Since the mid-1980s, there has been a noticeable movement in legal education, especially in the common law countries, to transform it into justice education. While ‘legal education’ in its traditional connotation refers to teaching and learning of the black letter laws, mainly for litigation purposes, justice education ventures well beyond traditional legal education to incorporate ideas of human dignity, empowerment of the poor and the marginalised including their access to justice to make the education socially relevant. The article argues that, despite having certain common features, justice education, both in content and in procedure, is fundamentally different in the global North and South, more so in countries of South Asia with massive poverty and ever-widening gaps between the rich and the poor. The article discusses a particular component of justice education in Bangladesh, the Community Law Reform Programme, popularly known as CLR, which has been experimented with and practised for almost two decades. The article demonstrates how CLR is different from other socio-legal researches and why it should be considered as an effective way of pursuing justice education for law students. The experience of CLR in Bangladesh since 2001 provides enough evidence to conclude that for justice education to be meaningful in societies like Bangladesh, it has to incorporate CLR in its curriculum. Finally, the article analyses how it has proven to be a challenge to incorporate CLR in the mainstream law school curriculum (even as a clinical component), despite its intricate relation to ‘rebellious lawyering’ as distinct from ‘generic/traditional’ lawyering.
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7. Access to justice and the need for a holistic approach to the delivery of legal aid services in developing countries: Lessons from South Africa
David McQuoid-Mason
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Legal Aid South Africa, in its previous incarnation as the Legal Aid Board, was established in 1969, and began operating in 1971. During the apartheid era the scheme had a very limited budget, and most of it was spent on civil matters, mainly serving the ruling minority white population. The mode of delivery chosen was the judicare model that has been used by many post-colonial Commonwealth countries, and was modelled on the initial England and Wales legal aid scheme in the United Kingdom that referred cases to private lawyers instead of employing full-time legal aid lawyers. Gradually, the national legal aid budget in South Africa was increased and more emphasis was placed on criminal rather than civil cases. After the introduction of a democratic Constitution in 1994, there were overwhelming demands for legal representation in criminal matters as a result of the constitutional safeguards regarding arrested, detained, and accused persons. This was because, like in many other Commonwealth developing countries, the majority of such persons arrested, detained, or accused were poor and could not afford legal representation. The huge increase in the volume of criminal cases requiring defence lawyers made the judicare system unsustainable. As a result, pilot projects were introduced to test a public defender model that included qualified lawyers in public defender offices and law intern public defenders in legal aid-funded law clinics. As is common experience in other countries, the pilot public defender model proved to be much more cost-effective and easier to manage than the judicare system. This led to a holistic approach by Legal Aid South Africa that has evolved into justice centres that incorporate qualified public defenders, law intern public defenders, and paralegals, as well as the use of private lawyers and cooperation agreements with public interest law firms, university law clinics, and paralegal organisations in cases that cannot be handled by the public defender offices. This article deals with the evolution of the holistic approach in South Africa and how the different entities involved operate.[/expand]

8. Social justice jurisprudence of clinical education programme: A paradigm shift from legal education to justice education
Yubaraj Sangroula
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The legal profession has remained relevant in bringing about positive transformation in society — with leaders, policymakers, and change makers around the world mostly possessing a background in the law. That said, the trust, and positive image, enjoyed by legal professionals continues on a declining path. Considered more glamorous, the legal profession has gone astray from the path of social justice. In this article, I argue that the negative perception of legal professionals is, in large part, because of the way legal professionals are taught and trained in law schools. I argue that legal teaching pedagogy in South Asia, and generally in developing countries, is a product of colonial structure. Even after the so-called decolonisation movement, law schools and universities, for example in South Asia, institutionalised a legal pedagogy unsuited to the epistemic actualities of their societies. A law student in South Asia was and continues to be taught the Western conception of what the law is and its relationship to justice. In a legal culture carrying the transplanted laws of the colonisers, the students of developing countries are meticulously trained in the technical skills of reasoning and interpretation by applying Eurocentric guidelines of positivist construction. In light of this, I propose a shift in legal education: to transform the existing legal education and pedagogy into ‘justice education’. I focus on the ancient principles — located in the Eastern legal philosophy — of empirical reasoning and the importance of the human nature of sociability in arriving at social justice. To combat the tendency of insulating law students from societal problems, I propose a social justice-driven legal pedagogy. I have also reflected on some practices that ‘are’ and highlighted other practices that ‘ought to be’. My thesis connotes that the legal profession has an innate role in building the capability of individuals who are deprived and excluded. In line with it, I present examples of scalable clinical legal education being practised specially by the Kathmandu School of Law that can create multidimensional legal professionalism.

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9. Feminist lawyering, violence against women, and the politics of law reform in India: An interview with Flavia Agnes
Oishik Sircar
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The history of the women’s movement’s relationship to law in India cannot be written without acknowledging the pioneering work of activist, advocate, and scholar Flavia Agnes. Her own life’s journey, engagement with the movement, involvement in women’s rights litigation, feminist jurisprudential scholarship, and outreach work through Majlis (the organisation she co-founded) offer key insights into the kind of movement-based legal pedagogy, awareness, and training that the women’s movement has fostered in India. Flavia’s activism and scholarship over the last three decades have opened up sophisticated critiques of rape law and family law reform in India that have become foundational to the field of what can be called Indian feminist jurisprudence. This interview offers insights into the autobiographical, the feminist, and the scholarly convergences in Flavia’s thinking and writing. She speaks with candour and conviction and introduces ways of thinking about feminist lawyering, violence against women, and the politics of law reform in India that are historically and theoretically grounded in an ethics of self-reflexivity and quotidian wisdom that the insulated nature of clinical legal education in India has much to learn from.
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10. Pedagogy of CLE and CLE as pedagogy: An interview with Ved Kumari
Latika Vashist
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In this conversation with Ved Kumari, Professor and Former Dean, Faculty of Law, University of Delhi, we navigate through different conceptions and practices of Clinical Legal Education (CLE), practical and ethical challenges in the implementation of CLE, and the importance of critical theory and jurisprudence to achieve the pedagogical goals of CLE. Drawing on her experience as a feminist clinical law professor, she critically approaches the twin goals of CLE — social justice and professional legal skills — on the one hand, and flags affective concerns which arise in live-client and community-based clinics, on the other. The conversation centres on the importance of the values of sustainability, professionalism, empathy, and critical self-reflection in conceptualisation and incorporation of CLE in the legal curriculum.
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BOOK REVIEW

11. Frank S Bloch (ed):  The Global Clinical Movement: Educating Lawyers for Social Justice
Meher Dev
Article

12. NR Madhava Menon (ed), Clinical Legal Education
Kavya Kartik
Article 

CORRECTION

13. Correction to: A tribute and a legacy: Clinical legal education and the bountiful harvest
Richard Grimes
Article 

14. Correction to: Fighting impunity in hate crime — history, ethics, and the law: An interview with Harsh Mander
M Mohsin Alam Bhat
Article 

15. Correction to: Transnational law as a framework for law clinics
Sital Kalantry & Rachael Hancock
Article