Exploring the Invisible Curriculum: Clinical Fieldwork in American Law Schools

The Harvard Report makes a number of recommendations to cure problems in legal education. I mean to focus on but one of them. The committee\u27s Final Report concludes that clinical experience ought to be a substantial part of legal education. It discusses suggestions on how this can best be accomplished at Harvard. My focus is narrower. I will address the possibilities of developing the extemship model, ratherthan the in-house model, to resolve some of these deeply troubling curricular problems. This article will probably raise more questions than it answers, but it will continue the process of replacing educational neglect with inquiry and evaluation. My exploration has three parts. First, as with any explorer, I will briefly review where we have been before. I will initially focus on the history of tension in legal education between the law schools and the bar, and on the clinical and non-clinical faculties within law schools. Second, based on a national study conducted in 1982-83, and other data, I will examine the nature and extent of fieldwork programs in American law schools, and something of their rela-tionship to other components of the clinical and professional skills training curriculum. Third, I will try to identify the potential strengths and weaknesses of these programs as they currently operate. I will not only look to pedagogy, but to issues of resources, management, control and relationship. What money and personnel are devoted by law schools to these programs? Who makes the key decisions and choices necessary to implement and run them? What is the relationship among law school faculty, administrators, students, and personnel at the field placement? Finally, drawing upon developments in clinical education generally, I will explore whether there are innovations or approaches which will maximize the potential of extemships as an integral part of legal education. In particular, I will focus on strengthening two critical elements of the process: curricular design and control, and supervision