A Circle Game: Issues in Australian Clinical Legal Education

The 1998 Federal budget included an allocation of $1.74 million over four years (1998/99 to 2002/2003) for “[d]eveloping more and better Clinical Legal Education to maximise service delivery to disadvantaged clients and cooperation with universities”. This is a significant development for Australia’s small clinical legal education (CLE) movement which, with only one exception, had not previously received direct Federal funding. While this provision of funding is obviously welcomed, the Commonwealth government’s objectives for this funding appear to focus on community service rather than educational outcomes. The Commonwealth is clearly of the view that CLE has potential as a vehicle for the provision of inexpensive legal advice. The Commonwealth government has now selected four CLE projects to be funded under this program. Funds will be provided to Griffith University, Monash University, Murdoch University and the University of New South Wales (UNSW). Both Griffith and Monash will be establishing specialist family law CLE projects while Murdoch and UNSW will be using their funding to maintain existing programs. All four successful projects strongly emphasise the importance of community service objectives, something which has been a hallmark of Australian CLE programs since the Monash, La Trobe and UNSW programs were established in the 1970s. The early Australian CLE programs benefited from the increasing availability of legal aid funding during the 1980s and this has now occurred once again with these new Commonwealth funds. While CLE has gained greatest prominence in the United States of America (USA), interest in clinical law has increased in a range of countries. 1998 saw the publication of books on CLE from both England and India. It appears that many of the challenges with clinical teaching (the resource intensive nature of clinic, limited opportunities for scholarship, supervision of students by non-academics, marginalisation within law schools, limited prospects for promotion and tenure) are fairly universal in nature. The announcement of the CLE funding provides a useful opportunity to review the development and current state of Australian CLE. This article considers what types of legal education can be described as clinical and then outlines the history of Australia’s CLE movement. The article then considers the scope for integration of clinical teaching before raising issues for the future.