A systematic review of the literature in Europe relating to clinical legal education

Abstract

As my PhD research is European focused, looking at knowledge, skills and attributes development in live client clinics, I wanted to find all the European literature relating to clinical legal education. The aim of this research was to find all of the European literature surrounding clinical legal education available to me, to explore the kind of research published and to identify any gaps in knowledge. With an explosion of literature within the field, and more research undertaken every year, finding the literature which related to my research was challenging. To help aid this work I embarked on a systematic review, building on work by Tribe Mkwebu,[1] systematically searching for peer reviewed articles. This research was initially presented at the European Network of Clinical Legal Education’s Spring Workshop, 2015, Northumbria University.  This article highlights the journey through this literature. Firstly, it explains what a systematic review is and how it can be used within mixed methods research. It then goes on to outline the methodology used and the number of articles sourced, excluded and synthesised. The analysis shows the amount of papers published before 2015 and their basic content. Finally, I discuss my reflection on the systematic review, what I thought went well and what didn’t, explaining how it was received at the Workshop.