Just Clinics: A Humble Manifesto

Student legal clinics are poised at the intersection of the crisis in the availability of legal services and pressure on law schools to produce practice-ready graduates. In a neoliberal policy environment, which emphasizes market-based outcomes, commodifies services, and obscures the structural roots of inequality, it is tempting to measure the work of student legal clinics in terms of their efficiency in providing services to large numbers of clients. In this article, I argue that law school clinics should instead be recognized as sites of justice, moving beyond the construct of “numbers served.” Using the idea of “access to actual justice” as opposed to mainstream versions of “access to justice,” I propose that the work of student legal clinics should be measured by way of three main tenets, namely, their adoption of a critical approach to access to justice, their meaningful accountability to the communities in which they work, and the extent to which they define competencies in terms of justice-readiness.