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In 1987, committed and enthusiastic law students of the University of the Western Cape (UWC) wished to contribute some service to disenfranchised communities and the Clinic was established. The Clinic was unstructured at that time and the focus of the Clinic was primarily access to justice. The Law Faculty seized the opportunity to make outreach part of its curriculum and it formalised the Clinic by appointing a Director and by placing the clinic within the Public and Adjective Law Department.
Thereafter it allowed students to obtain academic credits for the course. This was an important milestone in the Faculty’s history, as it took the step towards incorporating practical skills training into an academic course, and at the same time provided access to justice to indigent communities. Funds were obtained from the Ford Foundation by the Association of University Legal Aid Institution (AULAI) and the Attorneys Fidelity Fund to fund the operations of the Clinic. At the time the Clinic was a small operation. In 1993 the Clinic obtained formal law clinic accreditation and it allowed the clinic to provide articles of clerkship to disadvantaged persons. Today it is a fully fledged and operational law firm.
The Law Clinic has always had the reputation of being the leading clinic within the region and one of the best clinics in South Africa, due to its forward-thinking strategies within the clinical movement, offering quality legal services and its location within a progressive faculty. The Clinic is an accredited Law Clinic and operates with the permission and in compliance with the rules of the Legal Practice Council.
Since its inception, the Law Clinic has operated consistently with the University’s vision and guiding principles of being of value to its students and the community it serves. The Law Clinic upholds these principles by ensuring that the need for access to justice for its indigent clientele is upheld and by providing senior law students with clinical legal education (CLE) and training.
The aims and objectives of the Clinic are to provide:
legal representation and a legal service to indigent people with specific focus on gender, human rights abuses and socio-economic rights issues;
senior law students with CLE;
practical vocational training for candidate attorneys at the Law Clinic;
legal support and legal services to cluster partners and advice offices.
The Law Clinic is the core service learning facility of the Law Faculty which meets the practical legal education needs of the Faculty and helps to provide a well-rounded LLB education that the law profession demands. The Clinic also aims to inculcate professional and human rights values in students by exposing them to issues affecting indigent people and to human rights abuses.
In providing the CLE academic programme, the Clinic is tantamount to a Law laboratory and, like any laboratory, it is expensive to run. Every LLB student registered for the Legal Process module attends two lecture periods of 1 hour each, per week, in addition to their duty times in the Clinic as part of the Legal Practice LLB course, for which a basic and workable law office is required. The Clinic provides invaluable exposure to practice, and is one of the biggest attractions for prospective students to study Law at UWC. Furthermore, our graduates are marketable in the profession and ready to ‘hit the ground running’ in practice, and prospective employers know this.
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