The Bologna Process and German Legal Education: Developing Professional Competence Through Clinical Experiences

Abstract

The Bologna Process seeks to standardize higher education across the countries of the European Union to facilitate the broader goals of free movement, commerce, and furtherance of common interests among the EU nations. The Bologna Process seeks to establish this standardization by setting up various structural reforms to make higher education across the EU more consistent and more transferable from one country to another. It presents some special problems in the context of legal education.

the ultimate goal of legal education is to prepare law students for careers as legal practitioners The structural modifications envisioned by the Bologna process runs the risk of sacrificing the important on the altar of the immediate. Those responsible for training new lawyers for German society must keep the ultimate goal in mind as they strive to comply with the Bologna initiatives.

In this regard, it is useful to examine how lawyers are trained in the United States and ask whether the US experience can be of any benefit to the German legal academy as they consider the task of training competent professionals in the new paradigm imposed by the Bologna process. In particular, we consider whether the American concept of clinical legal education can help German curriculum reformers comply with the Bologna process while achieving the ultimate goal of preparing new lawyers for a professional career in law.

We review the history of legal education in the United States, tracing the development of American clinical legal education, identifying the essential skills and values American legal education seeks to impart, and briefly considering the future of clinical legal education in the United States. We then apply the American clinical paradigm to some of the issues facing German legal education in light of the Bologna reforms and offer suggestions on how German law faculties can draw upon the American experience to develop curricula that trains legal professionals and also satisfies the Bologna mandates. We conclude that integrating clinical experiences into the German law curriculum can improve the training of German law students and help satisfy the goals of the Bologna Process. We recommend German law faculties consider the American model of clinical education as they reform legal education to meet the demands of the Bologna Process.

Keywords: Bologna Process; legal education; clinical legal education; curriculum