WONG Siew Yin, Eleanor, Sonita JEYAPATHY, and CHEONG Jun Ming, Mervyn*
Centre for Pro Bono & Clinical Legal Education, Faculty of Law
Wong, E. S. Y., Jeyapathy, S., & Cheong, M. J. M. (2023). Law clinics: Microcosms of the inter-disciplinarity inherent in law practice [Paper presentation]. In Higher Education Campus Conference (HECC) 2023, 7 December, National University of Singapore. https://blog.nus.edu.sg/hecc2023proceedings/law-clinics-microcosms-of-the-inter-disciplinarity-inherent-in-law-practice/
SUB-THEME
Interdisciplinarity and Education
KEYWORDS
Clinical legal education, law clinics, experiential learning, legal skills programme
CATEGORY
Paper Presentation
ABSTRACT
In practice, a lawyer gets parachuted into the client’s world in all its complexity and chaos, and must help the client come up with a legal solution for the unique challenge at hand. A legal problem is rarely ever just a legal problem. The law transcends every aspect of society, community, and enterprise.
The lawyer must be able to understand their client’s specific needs to target a solution to them. Apart from being confident and competent in legal principles and theories, the modern lawyer must be able to appreciate and comfortably operate in landscapes where the law intersects with other disciplines such as technology, finance, psychiatry, and forensics.
So really a lawyer cannot just be a lawyer. A lawyer must also be able to operate in the world of a detective, profiler, psychologist, a techie, and much more.
How then do we prepare law students for this? The key must revolve around providing students with opportunities to hone their ability to be agile learners and to expose them to legal challenges that present themselves in evolving legal landscapes in a closely supervised way, so that they can develop crucial practical competencies.
Our solution is to develop and curate law clinics for our students which are microcosms of the interdisciplinarity inherent in the practice of law, and utilise resources and networks to actively support these students as they participate in the law clinics.
Through the Centre for Pro Bono & Clinical Legal Education, the NUS Faculty of Law is the first law school in Singapore to establish law clinics as part of the faculty’s regular course listing of elective subjects. The NUS law clinics expose the participating students to legal matters that could have cross-disciplinary aspects in actual live legal matters.
Like most experiential learning modalities, the pedagogical approach adopted is: first, for the clinic supervisors to expressly articulate their thought process through discussions on the live legal matters, including the reasoning behind decisions to take certain action or not, and the students are guided through reflection to pick up the learning points; and second, a mastery learning approach by providing students with constant feedback and opportunities to revise and improve their work before giving a final assessment grade for the task assigned.
Under the sub-theme of “Interdisciplinarity and Education”, the proposed paper presentation will focus on three of the faculty’s law clinics: the first two relate to the legal-tech and environmental, and social and governance (ESG) space, respectively, and the third deals with criminal law litigation involving serious crimes where forensics and psychiatry issues arise. The paper will elaborate on how these law clinics are curated and carried out and highlight key findings, from past students’ feedback on how the students’ learning journey in the law clinics have impacted their outlook about legal practice. The paper will then conclude that the NUS Law clinics course, new as it may be amongst Singapore’s law schools, provides an appropriate platform for law students to actively appreciate and acquire an ability to confidently think, both critically and creatively, from a wider and more comprehensive perspective, where interdisciplinary aspects are involved in their legal practice, upon their graduation.
REFERENCES
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Wilson, Richard (2018). Legal aid and clinical legal education in Europe and the USA: Are they compatible? In Outsourcing Legal Aid in the Nordic Welfare States. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322009213_Legal_Aid_and_Clinical_Legal_Education_in_Europe_and_the_USA_Are_They_Compatible.