The Anatomy of a Clinical Law Course

Since the summer of 1965 when the Michigan Supreme Court first authorized law student practice on the behalf of indigent persons, students at the University of Michigan Law School have been engaged in extensive practice on behalf of indigent persons in Washtenaw County. Between 75 and 125 second and third year students at the University of Michigan Law School each semester have worked at the Washtenaw County Legal Aid Clinic under the direction of the OEO Staff attorneys. Students receive neither credit nor pay for such work and their activities are not directly supervised by the faculty. That volunteer experience has become an important and continuing part of the extracurricular legal education at Michigan and an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of that experience would undoubtedly be illuminating. However, I intend to devote the pages that follow not to the Michigan volunteer experience but to a description of a credit course which I conducted at the Washtenaw County Legal Aid Clinic in the summer of 1969. For want of a better title we called the course Clinical Law