Painful Injustices: Encountering Social Suffering in Clinical Legal Education

Abstract

In this article, I examine and problematize clinical law students’ encounters with traumatic stories and expressions of suffering of some clients. I argue that without critical reflection, these encounters can function to produce and reinforce dominant understandings of suffering as a non-legal, private emotional or psychological attribute of clients, a matter to be referred to other professionals, ignored, or otherwise “managed” by the lawyer. This type of “reading” of suffering, I argue, can serve to reinforce acontextual, uncritical legal practice. Furthermore, I argue that in clinical law contexts this reification of notions of professional identity and role is often problematically compounded with the reproduction of dominant images of poor clients as victims, or as helpless, or as responsible for their suffering. By drawing on the eclectic and emerging body of literature on “social suffering,” as well as the critical feminist and post-colonial theoretical literature on emotions, suffering and “embodied encounters,” I highlight the importance of paying attention to encounters with human suffering in clinical legal education. I describe aspects of a critical “pedagogy of suffering” in clinical law contexts, a pedagogy that views human suffering as a signifier of larger political and systemic injustice, and one which encourages critical, attentive and politicized “witnessing” and responses to suffering by lawyers and law students.

Keywords: Clinical legal education, social suffering, pedagogy of suffering