The Carnegie Report, "Educated Lawyers," and Best Practices for Legal Education have stimulated a conversation about change in many law schools, including about how and whether to educate lawyers for practice. As professors who have played a central role in educating graduates for practice and in pushing reform in legal education, clinicians have been and will be an important voice in these conversations. The conference will provide clinical educators with knowledge and skills needed for improving their own programs and participating meaningfully in institutional change. The conference’s goal is to empower clinicians and other faculty whether their school is deeply engaged in discussions about Carnegie and Best Practices or whether the conversation has not even begun.

Both Carnegie and Best Practices, as well as the ABA, have called for law schools to identify with greater precision what our students should learn and be able to do after graduation. Thus, the conference will begin with a focus on outcomes and assessment, identifying how to frame outcomes that shape the student’s education and how to measure our effectiveness as teachers.

Next, as we think about changing legal education and our own clinical courses, we must ensure that change is not limited to creating greater technical competence but includes educating students about professional values and norms, especially commitments to social justice. Carnegie criticizes an approach to teaching law that eliminates a justice dimension and both reports identify professional commitments to justice and equality as important professional values to teach. The conference will address these concerns by exploring the contributions that critical race and other critical theories about law, practice and legal education can add to the discussions about what students need to learn and how best to teach them.

Finally we will explore how change occurs by engaging theories of institutional change and applying them to legal education, our law schools and our clinical courses. We will look at a variety of issues such as content, sequencing and design of clinical programs, integration of clinical courses and methodologies within the entire curriculum, and status.

Through a range of plenary and mini-plenary sessions, focused concurrent sessions, and small working group meetings, clinicians will examine these issues by drawing on expertise both within and outside of legal education. The emphasis, as in all clinical conferences, will be on the interaction among participants and between participants and presenters.