Reflecting Clinics at 50: Reports from the Field

For lawyers, learning law by practicing law is customary. In the world of legal education, learning from practice is situated in both acceptance and opposition. There are practical arguments in its favor—the practicing bar wants law graduates to be “practice ready,” and theoretical arguments—understanding how law operates in the real world yields a clearer understanding of law itself, how it maintains social and economic structures, and how it impacts individuals. At the University of Georgia, law students, hungry for a legal education and a bar license, have been learning from practice in the Law School’s clinical programs for over fifty years. This article provides a window into that educational process. It offers no singular narrative, lecture or opinion. Rather, it presents the law student experience in clinical legal education through the voices of the students themselves in the Criminal Defense Practicum. Like the difference between the professor-focused classroom and the experience-focused clinic, we have removed the mediating influence of the faculty member