Law Clinics in Taiwan: Can Clinical Legal Education Succeed in this Civil Law Jurisdiction with an Undergraduate Legal Education System?
Law school clinics are an important part of legal education around the world, but there are still many places without clinics, including Taiwan. It is important for Taiwanese legal educators to consider whether and how clinical education might fit into the Taiwanese legal education system. When discussing clinical education, several concerns are commonly raised: are undergraduate students capable of doing and benefitting from clinical work? Is student practice legal? What effect does student practice have on quality of representation? How does a clinic fit with the existing apprenticeship program? Who would teach a clinic? How do clinics fit with the legal academy’s view of itself and its purposes? Can Taiwanese law schools afford to operate clinics? Ultimately, none of these concerns presents a serious obstacle to the introduction of clinical education. Taiwanese law schools should introduce clinics to their curriculum to give students the opportunity to enjoy the many benefits of clinical education.
The Roles of U.S. Law Faculty in Developing Countries: Striving for Effective Cross-Cultural Collaboration
This Article focuses on one of the key ways in which the trend toward globalization and the creation of a more integrated world has manifested itself in the legal education community: the increased number of visits by U.S. lawyers and law professors to overseas school. A large number of those consultants have come from the clinical law community, and specific attention is paid here to the efforts of these clinicians both in broad-based projects in Iraq, China, and Russia, as well as smaller scale ones in other parts of the world, particularly sub-Saharan Africa.The Article’s jumping-off point is to contrast these recent efforts with those forty years ago during the “Law and Development Movement,” an era which has been severely criticized because the American experts who visited foreign countries then never bothered to learn the way justice was administered and law was taught in the U.S. The failure of those efforts demonstrated the need to adopt a different approach, and the data reviewed for this Article indicates that to successfully support the implementation of positive reforms in other countries, the methodology needs to be more collaborative.The Article therefore concludes that in practical terms this means that both U.S. funders and the consultants they support will have to involve colleagues from the host country from the out-set in establishing the purpose and the goals for the project. Further, the overseas visitors will have to thoroughly immerse themselves in the local context and culture early in the process and then maintain a high level of collaboration through all phases of delivery to insure that the reforms they seek can work in the local context. Finally, particular attention will have to be paid to and during the collaboration to those factors that will help sustain the reforms after the formal consultation has ended.
Historias de mi barrio: contemporary art in a community at high risk of social exclusion
Abstract Historias de mi barrio is a piece of pedagogic research aimed at highlighting the way art can articulate the relationship between the educational context and a neighbourhood at high risk of social exclusion. The starting point for this study was to ask whether this type of research, centred around the arts, was suitable in complex contexts and whether it might eventually lead to pedagogic improvement. The results gathered, and indeed the work carried out by the artists and university lecturers involved, together with pupils 6–12 years old and their instructors in a state school, provide evidence of a positive answer – and notably of the necessity of knowing about the socio-economic reality of the student cohort when planning learning projects and of the importance of the arts as a crucial element in education.