-Click here to view the preliminary brochure (PDF)-

The 2008 Conference on Clinical Legal Education will provide an opportunity for us to reflect individually and collectively on our work and mistakes to learn through experience and influence choices we make in the future. While we teach our students techniques for engaging in reflection, we sometimes neglect to follow our lessons in regard to our own activities. We will reflect on how our errors in planning, in memory or in execution of ideas have caused divergence among our intentions, actions and consequences. We will discuss risks we have taken, missteps we have made and opportunities that we encounter in our classroom teaching and supervision. We will also reflect on our struggles in moving clinical legal education forward within the Academy.

The methodologies we use as clinical teachers involve complex pedagogical processes with multiple goals, requiring the identification of many issues. In our planning, we try to analyze and anticipate the possible consequences of our pedagogical choices for our students and their clients, yet we may find ourselves surprised or disappointed with the outcomes. We will explore techniques to find a balance among conflicting values in teaching and supervision, in order to engage students better in self-reflection, practice theory and substantive law while promoting social justice.

In addition to our daily work as clinical teachers, we also are part of a movement to make clinical education fundamental within the Academy. Through struggles at our own institutions, work within clinical organizations, participation in the organizational structures of legal education, and projects designed to change the shape of legal education, we face complicated choices about how to guide our movement and improve legal education. We anticipate making this conference a time to reflect on the developments in that movement and the opportunities for the future. The clinical community’s involvement in and response to the ABA MacCrate Report and our efforts regarding the Carnegie Foundation Report on Legal Education and Best Practices for Legal Education provide a useful and timely focus for this reflection.

The reflective process poses challenges to clinicians at all levels of experience. Those relatively new to clinical teaching will be encouraged to takes risks and explore mistakes in a supportive environment. The Conference will reinvigorate more-experienced clinicians to explore new teaching methods and models for supervision. Together, we will explore ways to understand and surmount continuing challenges to clinical teaching within the Academy.

Located at the base of the Santa Catalina Mountain range in Northwest Tucson, the Conference setting provides an ideal environment for learning, self-reflection and relaxation!