Engagement through Teaching and Learning

Simulated exercises/live-client consultations give clinicians the opportunity to impart not only knowledge but also skills to legal students. Simulated exercises/live-client consultations can be used as a learning tool for almost any activity which legal professionals are expected to engage in. Provided the necessary infrastructure is in place, the scope of these exercises is only limited by the imagination and prowess of those presenting the clinical course.

Simulated exercises/live-client consultations are ideally suited to realise the goals of Clinical Legal Education (CLE). Through these activities students are taught to critically evaluate and analyse problems and to deal with these issues in a suitably professional manner. A very natural transfer of skills is intrinsically part of student learning.

Students are exposed to issues of social justice through appropriate simulated facts and situations. They are taught social and professional responsibility as they put their substantive law knowledge into practice. This is often done in group format and they learn to cooperate with others in developing their lawyering and professional skills. This form of teaching also affords the opportunity to impart training in sound legal ethics, as professional moral considerations can be built into the facts.

Through the use of simulated exercises/live-client consultations students are encouraged to think and then, critically, to at like legal professionals. These exercises guarantee that cognitive knowledge is continuously converted to experiential learning. In this way students first have to master the theory in order to properly demonstrate that they have become proficient in the required skills.

Furthermore, simulated exercises/live-client consultations give students an opportunity to gain invaluable experience in the tasks they will be involved with in their later legal careers. While entrenching cognitive knowledge in the minds of the students, it transcends a detached theoretical book learning of the subject matter.

The forms of CLE that the clinic offers in ensuring an engagement with students through teaching and learning, are explained under the following three sub-headings:

a) Legal Process;

b) Street Law; and

c) Internships.