Committing to Change: Building International Uncertainty and Fluidity into Clinic Design

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Session Type: AALS Programs

Session Capacity: N/A

Hotel: N/A

Room: Salon 3

Floor: Third Floor

This panel will explore the role of imprecision, fluidity, and nonlinearity as a pedagogy and practice tool for clinics, using recent social justice movement literature as its starting point. Teaching students to sit with situations of “imprecision,” “nonlinearity,” “trust,” and “fluidity” is necessary—particularly in the current political environment—yet runs counter to skills students are traditionally taught in law school, which emphasize the discovery of the precise, the concrete, the fixed in any situation or problem. This panel provides an overview of how recent literature prioritizes adaptiveness, fluidity, and “emergence” theories as organizing tools, and offer examples of why the theory and practices should be considered in the pedagogical design and lawyering operation of both litigation and non-litigation clinics. Drawing from these texts, the panel will highlight exercises and lawyering work that prioritize trust, strengthen collaboration, and support confidence among students, supervisors, clients, system actors, community partners, and colleagues. As stated in a central text we consider, Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown, incorporating these principles allows us to “practice at a small scale what we most want to see at the universal level.”
The panelists will invite the audience to engage in discussions and small group brainstorming as to how elements of these strategies could be used in clinics. Attendees will leave the panel with an introduction to these new concepts, multiple methods of implementing this theory, and concrete tools and reflection prompts to use with their own students.