Empowering the Underprivileged: The Social Justice Mission for Clinical Legal Education in India

2015 ◽  
pp. 177-193
Author(s):  
Shuvro Prosun Sarker
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
The Social ◽  
Education In India

scholarly journals Empowering The Underprivileged: The Social Justice Mission For Clinical Legal Education In India

2014 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 321 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shuvro Prosun Sarker
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
Legal Aid ◽  
Law Schools ◽  
The Social ◽  
Education In India ◽  
History Of ◽  
Clinical Models ◽  
Indian Law

<p>The 1960s and 1970s were an important time in the history of legal education in India, when the legal aid movement and various legal aid committees’ reports started to draw attention to the importance of experiential learning, or learning on the job, in legal education. The main aim of involving law students in the national legal aid movement was to make them feel more responsible for the considerable part of the Indian population who, because of their socio-economic status, couldn’t access justice. The history of how India’s clinical programs were introduced has a lot in common with the history of clinical programs in other parts of the world. There was a desire to create a pool of lawyers, who would serve as soldiers in the fight for social justice for underprivileged groups in the country.</p><p>While some prestigious universities started their clinical programs in the 1970s, most of the regulators of legal education took a long time to include clinical papers in the curriculum. In 1997 the Bar Council of India introduced four practical papers in the curriculum. The spirit of public service, and the widespread poverty in a country, has always been central to the push for clinical programs everywhere. But in India, the legal aid committees’ and other statutory bodies’ reports calling for clinical programs to support social justice, were always ignored. The National Knowledge Commission’s working group on legal education specifically mentioned the need to introduce students to issues relating to poverty, social change and social exclusion, through clinical legal education.</p><p>After the introductory section, the second section discusses the introduction of clinical programs with their roots in the search for social justice in the United States and India. The third section discusses the continuous deliberation by various bodies, commissions and committees about the need to introduce clinical programs with a social justice perspective in India. The fourth section discusses the social justice-based clinical programs in China and South Africa. This section tries to highlight some of the clinical models focused on serving underprivileged groups, that have been introduced and implemented in these two countries and which ~ after local modifications ~ could serve as a template for programs in Indian law schools. The fifth section tries to search for clinical models best suited to India with reference to clinical programs in China and South Africa. Several examples of clinical activities in a few Indian law schools have been highlighted in this chapter to explain these models’ effectiveness and suitability for Indian circumstances. The sixth section sets out some suggestions for law schools and stakeholders of legal education in India as to how to further the country’s social justice mission of clinical legal education.</p>

scholarly journals Interface of Law and Medicine in Clinical Legal Education: Success story of the Women’s Law Clinic in improving the health of women and ensuring women’s access to Justice in Nigeria

2014 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevwe Omoragbon
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
South Africa ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
Access To Justice ◽  
Success Story ◽  
African Countries ◽  
The Social

<p>Specialist law clinics now operate both in the developed and developing world. The historical background of these specialist law clinics can be traced to the United States. They also abound in South Africa, Europe and are fast emerging in several African countries. It is however outside the scope of this paper to describe the wide variety of specialist law clinic models that exist in other countries.</p><p><br />At present in Nigeria, there are seven Nigerian Universities with law clinics. These law clinics in enhancing the social justice frontier have developed projects addressing specific problems; making them specialists in service delivery, but the Women’s Law Clinic, is the only gender specialist law clinic.</p>

scholarly journals Clinical Legal Education in the Law University: Goals and Challenges

2014 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Barry
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
The United States ◽  
Law School ◽  
Law Students ◽  
Global Alliance ◽  
Education In India ◽  
Model Law ◽  
Education Conference

<p>Calls for reform of legal education in India have focused on preparation and relevance. The route to achieving both has consistently been linked to clinical legal education. In 1999, I heard one of the leaders of legal education in India, Dr. Madhava Menon, discuss his goals for clinical legal education in at the first Global Alliance for Justice Education Conference in Trivandrum. I learned at the time that he had been invited to lead a new law school in the country, and he made it clear that clinical legal education would be central to the new law school model that he intended to pursue, a model based on recommendations that grew out of prior assessments of legal education in India. Under this model, law students would be trained to be productive members of a community of lawyers that had refined the skills needed to develop and implement creative  strategies for addressing the pressing demand for social justice in the country. The approach reflected a connection between responsibility for the underserved and goals for clinical legal education in India that dates back to collaboration with academics from the United States in the late 1960’s.</p>

Advancements in Legal Education in India: Challenges and Opportunities for Interdisciplinary Research

2020 ◽  
pp. 232200582094669
Author(s):  
K. Rajashree ◽  
Chetan Singai ◽  
Shimreichon Awungshi Shimray
Keyword(s):  
Academic Discipline ◽  
Social Process ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
Legal Research ◽  
Judicial Process ◽  
Creative Solutions ◽  
The Social ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities ◽  
Education In India ◽  
Identification Analysis

Social, economic and political changes have brought new challenges and divergent views to twenty-first-century legal education. Law is an expression of the social idea, and more creative solutions evolve from interdisciplinary collaborations. The resolution by legal luminaries to elevate legal research to a high standing, on par with other disciplines, is yet to find a foothold even after the introduction of reforms to legal education in the past two decades. This article makes an attempt to explore the emerging interdisciplinary trends, with the innumerable challenges that require exploration, identification, analysis and quality enhancement while conducting legal research in order to strike a fine balance between teaching and research, as they supplement each other. Law is a mechanism for ushering in social change, and the fact that it can never be studied in isolation demands the convergence and divergence of multiple disciplines. Yet, the traditional conceptualization of legal research is largely confined to the judicial process and the exclusion of social process. Keeping in mind the benefits of interdisciplinary association of law with other areas/disciplines and of research being a continuum, the article emphasizes law’s collaboration with other disciplines. The article accentuates the role of law schools to undertake and encourage interdisciplinary legal scholarship to diversify the learning experiences of students in conjunction with other disciplines. Learning through such experiences enables students to find solutions beyond the strict academic discipline of law and at the same time offers ample opportunities for them to explore a wide array of possibilities that interface with legal profession but transcend courtroom practice. A comparative analysis of two educational institutions imparting legal education, taken as cases in point, is performed for the present study.

scholarly journals Legal Education: New Challenges

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (IV) ◽  
pp. 43-50
Author(s):  
NIRMAL A HERMA
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
Law Schools ◽  
High Position ◽  
Broad Concept ◽  
Education In India ◽  
New Challenges ◽  
Very High ◽  
Democratic Country

Legal education should aim at promoting ‘Justice’ - The idea of Bar Council of India was to make the study of law as prestigious and attractive as technological and management studies - What is legal education doing for social justice? - The law schools of this country are confronted with the great task of infusing into our legal system - We have been discussing what our law needs - Legal education as a science which imparts to students’ knowledge of certain principles and provisions of law - Profession of law is a noble calling and the members of the legal profession occupies a very high position - legal education should not only produce attorneys but should be observed as a legal tool for social proposal – The aims of legal education may be multi-fold in a developing democratic country like India - Legal education is a broad concept - Legal education is influenced by a multitude of factors. - The function of the Bar Council of India as rules on standards of Legal Education. Legal education institutions engage in field of legal education and strive to improve the quality of legal education in India. There are many challenges and issues surrounding legal education.

Comparing Legal Clinics: Is There a Way to a European Clinical Culture?

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-139
Author(s):  
Elise Poillot
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
Civil Law ◽  
Legal Research ◽  
European Context ◽  
Consumer Law ◽  
The Social ◽  
Clinical Culture ◽  
Legal Model ◽  
The University

This paper compares the context of clinical legal education in the us and in continental Europe. It aims to understand whether and to which extent the American clinical legal model can be implemented in continental Europe. It argues that because of the different social and legal environments, this model needs to be adapted to the European context with particular regard to the social justice dimension of legal clinics. It also argues that given the importance granted by the civil law tradition to the teaching of legal science, legal clinics should not be disconnected from legal research, but on the contrary, be framed in order to favour it. It ended by presenting an attempt to implement this approach by describing the functioning of the Consumer Law Clinic of the University of Luxembourg, which was specifically designed to achieve this goal.

Bologna, My Love: Il Cinema Ritrovato

2019 ◽  
Vol 73 (2) ◽  
pp. 72-79
Author(s):  
Carla Marcantonio
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Francis Ford Coppola ◽  
The Social ◽  
Ongoing Project

FQ books editor Carla Marcantonio guides readers through the 33rd edition of Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival held each year in Bologna at the end of June. Highlights of this year's festival included a restoration of one of Vittorio De Sica's hard-to-find and hence lesser-known films, the social justice fairy tale, Miracolo a Milano (Miracle in Milan, 1951). The film was presented by De Sica's daughter, Emi De Sica, and was an example of the ongoing project to restore De Sica's archive, which was given to the Cineteca de Bologna in 2016. Marcantonio also notes her unexpected responses to certain reviewings; Apocalypse Now: Final Cut (2019), presented by Francis Ford Coppola on the large-scale screen of Piazza Maggiore and accompanied by remastered Dolby Atmos sound, struck her as a tour-de-force while a restoration of David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986) had lost some of its strange allure.

Social Justice and Dietetic Education: Are We Preparing Practitioners to Lead?

2020 ◽  
Vol 81 (3) ◽  
pp. 120-126
Author(s):  
Jennifer Brady
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Education And Training ◽  
Determinants Of Health ◽  
Structural Determinants ◽  
Social Justice Advocacy ◽  
Dietetic Education ◽  
Qualitative Survey ◽  
The Social ◽  
Reflexive Practice ◽  
And Training

Purpose: To explore dietetic practitioners’ perceptions of their education and training in the knowledge, skills, and confidence to understand social justice issues and to engage in socially just dietetic practice and social justice advocacy. Methods: An online semi-qualitative survey sent to Canadian dietitians. Results: Most respondents (n = 264; 81.5%) felt that knowledge- and skill-based learning about social justice and social justice advocacy should be a part of dietetic education and training. Reasons given by respondents for the importance of social justice learning include: client-centred care and reflexive practice, effecting change to the social and structural determinants of health, preventing dietitian burnout, and relevance of the profession. Yet, over half of respondents either strongly disagreed or disagreed that they were adequately prepared with the knowledge (n = 186; 57.4%), skills (n = 195; 60.2%), or confidence (n = 196; 60.5%) to engage in advocacy related to social justice concerns. Some questioned the practicality of adding social justice learning via additional courses to already full programs, while others proposed infusing a social justice lens across dietetic education and practice areas. Conclusions: Dietetic education and training must do more to prepare dietitians to answer calls for dietitians to engage in social justice issues through practice and advocacy.

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