The Stages of the Clinical Supervisory Relationship

Clinical education is an established fact in legal education today, despite continuing battles in individual schools over the size and budget of the clinical curriculum and the status of clinical teachers.\u27 Because of increasing pressure from students, the Bar, and faculty committed to the creation and maintenance of clinical courses, law schools have responded by labeling a widely diverse body of courses as falling under that heading. Many of these courses bear only scant resemblance to the service-oriented, live, poverty law clinics that were once the model for clinical programs.2 While no attempt will be made here to call for renewed purity in what will pass for clinical education, a characteristic common to those courses categorized as clinical is the experiential basis of the learning process. Students in these courses assume the role of a lawyer, and study and learn from this role.3 At a distressingly large number of schools, the process of clinical education goes largely unsupervised. But at a majority of schools, and certainly at those with programs recognized as exemplary, individualized supervision of student work is an integral part of clinical teaching