Masters of our Destiny – The Integration of law clinic into post graduate Masters provision

Abstract

Increasingly students are looking to their undergraduate law degrees to do more than provide them with a qualification which acts a ‘stepping stone’ to further legal vocational training. The provision of law degrees across the sector includes both qualifying and non-qualifying degrees where the study of law is combined with other subjects, vocational and non-vocational. Not all students who obtain a qualifying law degree will continue to the vocational stage of training, but all degrees need to address the employability agenda, and law students in particular need to consider future career aspirations early on in their degree.

Clinical legal education as a teaching methodology has received considerable academic attention for the benefits student engagement can yield in enhancing the overall student learning experience This paper briefly reviews the benefits of undergraduate clinical legal education (CLE) and considers the benefits of developing this at post graduate level in a Masters in Law programme This paper considers the distinction between the two approaches and the need for a different approach to the provision of a law clinic module within a postgraduate law Masters programme, identifying a possible model of delivery.

The paper further presents some of the potential challenges in developing and maintaining this provision over time and attempts to offer some insight into how these have been considered in the development of a postgraduate law clinic module at the University of Derby.