Measuring Law School Clinics

40 Pages Posted: 7 Aug 2017 Last revised: 4 Mar 2018

See all articles by Colleen F. Shanahan

Colleen F. Shanahan

Columbia University - Law School

Jeffrey Selbin

University of California, Berkeley - School of Law

Alyx Mark

Wesleyan University Dept. of Government; American Bar Foundation

Anna E. Carpenter

The University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law

Date Written: February 1, 2018

Abstract

Legal education reformers have long argued that law school clinics address two related needs: first, clinics teach students to be lawyers; and second, clinics serve low-income clients. In clinics, so the argument goes, law students working under the close supervision of faculty members learn the requisite skills to be good practitioners and professionals. In turn, clinical law students serve clients with civil and criminal justice needs that would otherwise go unmet.

Though we have these laudable teaching and service goals — and a vast literature describing the role of clinics in both the teaching and service dimensions — we have scant empirical evidence about whether and how clinics achieve these goals. We know from studies that law students value clinics, but do clinics prepare them to be lawyers? We also know from surveys that clinics provide hundreds of thousands of hours of free legal aid in low-income communities, but how well do clinic students serve clients?

These are big questions across a complex field and set of practices that cannot be answered by a single study. Nevertheless, we report here findings from a large data set of cases that shed some light on the teaching-service promise of law school clinics. Analyzing thousands of unemployment insurance cases involving different types of representation, we are able to compare clinical law students’ use of legal procedures and outcomes to those of experienced attorneys in cases in the same court.

We find that clinical law students behave very similarly to practicing attorneys in their use of legal procedures. Their clients also experience very similar case outcomes to clients of practicing attorneys. Though further research is needed on the impact of law school clinics in the teaching and service dimensions, our findings are consistent with claims that law school clinics help prepare students to be practicing lawyers and to serve low-income clients as well as lawyers do.

Keywords: access to justice, law school clinics, legal education, empirical research, representation

Suggested Citation

Shanahan, Colleen F. and Selbin, Jeffrey and Mark, Alyx and Carpenter, Anna E., Measuring Law School Clinics (February 1, 2018). 92 Tulane L. Rev. 547 (2018), UC Berkeley Public Law Research Paper, Temple University Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2017-27, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3013810

Colleen F. Shanahan (Contact Author)

Columbia University - Law School ( email )

435 West 116th Street
New York, NY 10025
United States

Jeffrey Selbin

University of California, Berkeley - School of Law ( email )

215 Boalt Hall
Berkeley, CA 94720-7200
United States

Alyx Mark

Wesleyan University Dept. of Government ( email )

United States

American Bar Foundation ( email )

750 N. Lake Shore Drive
Chicago, IL 60611
United States

Anna E. Carpenter

The University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law ( email )

383 S. University Street
Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0730
United States
84112 (Fax)

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