CU Law Profs Bring Expertise in Clinical Teaching to Eastern European Schools

“How would you feel about a doctor who had never interacted with a patient?” asked Columbia Law School professor Barbara Schatz, chair of the Public Interest Law Initiative, about the opportunity students have to represent real-world clients. Yet while the technique promoted by PILI—known as clinical legal teaching—has existed since the 1960s in the United States, it is just starting up in Eastern Europe.

In clinical legal education, students handle cases for clients under the supervision of professors while taking seminars that cover both the substantive law and the progress of their cases. According to Schatz, whose initiative is now divorced from the University, these clinics do not represent “just a summer job,” but rather a joining of “theory and practice.” A class on the way the students care for their clients, she notes, is as much a priority as the students’ development as advocates.

“The ABA [American Bar Association] requires that law schools have training other than theoretical, some kind of experiential training,” Schatz said, adding that such programs are necessary on a competitive level since almost all American law schools offer them.

Until recently, this was not the case in Eastern Europe.

Law schools in the region were historically confronted with the confines of a civil-law tradition—one in which legal training is doled out via lectures, rather than through hands-on experience. Many Eastern European countries previously had a system whereby law students were bound by long apprenticeships to practicing attorneys, leading some to believe clinical training was unnecessary.

These countries’ governmental pasts have also stood as obstacles.

“All of these countries emerged fairly recently from communism,” Schatz said, adding that people “perceived the law as a system of repression.”

In a democratic form of government, people must be taught to see law in a different light, to implement it “to accomplish their own goals and express their own values,” Schatz said.

Clinical teaching experiences in the U.S. and Eastern Europe diverge in other respects.

Every American state has its own provisions permitting students to function as attorneys in real cases as long as they are monitored, but in places like Poland, clinics tend to be “advice only,” according to Schatz. This means that while students can meet with clients, draft opinions, run them past teachers, and then report back to clients, they cannot represent the client in court.

But clinical legal teaching does more than train students in the field, according to its proponents. It has also proven effective in giving a voice to the underrepresented.

“We serve people that would ordinarily not receive representation,” said Jane Spinak, a professor of clinical law. Citing the example of a mother who has killed her children, she described a typical marginalized member of society as “not a popular client, and yet a client who needs representation.”

Posing the question of how one can train “lawyers that understand ... a democratic rule-of-law system” without giving them experiential training, Spinak said, “I think that universities and law schools took advantage of the transition into democracy to evaluate how they were going to develop the rule of law.”

taylor.napolitano@columbiaspectator.com