Teaching Critical & Liberatory Advocacy Practices

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Session Type: Concurrent Sessions

Session Capacity: N/A

Hotel: N/A

Room: Plaza A

Floor: Lobby Level

This session seeks to explore how to teach liberatory advocacy practices within clinics. By liberatory practices we mean lawyering practices that facilitates client resistance and collective mobilization to dismantle structures and systems that maintain hierarchy through [sustainable] systemic change. Each of our clinics (one transactional, two immigration and one workers’ rights focused) engage in case/project selection and selection of materials to discuss in class that (we think) help facilitate students engaging in liberatory practices. While liberatory approaches comport with the clinical legal education’s mission to promote social justice as a core value of the legal profession, they may at times be in tension with the controlling law and practices for a clinic that engages in individual direct representation or appear impractical and time-consuming even when clinics engage in community partnerships. With clinical resources already stretched thin, some students may question the value of these approaches rather than simply learning “traditional” lawyering skills. Further, such liberatory advocacy practices can be time-consuming and inherently messy when it requires collaborating with impacted communities. The goal of this session is to: • Understand what liberatory advocacy practice means/how it differs from more traditional lawyering practices • Understand the challenges of teaching liberatory advocacy practices • Explore different approaches to engaging students in such liberatory advocacy practices • Leave participants with a set of concrete tools and resources that can be used in their clinics to engage in liberatory advocacy practices