Clinical Legal Education

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Session Type: Section Programs

Session Capacity: 130

Location: Sheraton New York Times Square Hotel

Room: Bowery

Floor: Lower Level

This panel of clinical educators will inform and engage attendees on the question of the value of clinical education—understanding it and measuring it. We will examine the trope of clinical education being “costly” by drawing upon existing studies of the factors that go into the finances of clinical education relative to other parts of the curriculum. Beyond cost, we want to help the audience identify the many different ways clinics add value to our students, to our institutions, to our communities, and to the legal profession. We aim to name these ways of understanding value, as specifically as possible, but with the understanding that the actual value will very much be a school-by-school calculation. Finally, we want to engage the participants in the vital question of how we measure value, building from existing experience in measuring cost, and thinking about how the value measurement might relate to the kind of results measurement that law schools are engaged in more broadly. We hope participants will come away with a framework they can adapt at their own institutions, and have a conversation about what is missing from discussions of value at our respective institutions, and how best we can improve the quality of those discussions.