"The Clinical Year"

On the question of how to bring law schools and lawyers together in the work of educating law students for the practice of law, I've recently posted online a short article I published in spring 2009 in my school's law review, the New York Law School Law Review. The piece is called "The Clinical Year." Here's the abstract:

"This article makes the case for the value -- and the feasibility, under current accreditation and related rules governing law schools -- of a clinical rotation for law students, modeled on the rotations that are a key part of medical school education. The 'clinical year,' which would engage students in almost full-time practice/study for their third year of law school, could be a significant step in building the complete apprenticeship that the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has urged. It would also rely to a large extent on the supervision, and teaching, that adjunct law school faculty -- supervisors at the rotation settings -- would provide. In that respect, the 'clinical year' differs from in-house clinical education. The article addresses the differences in students' experience that this approach to bridging the gap between theory and practice would generate, and argues that this model is worth exploring, despite -- and in some respects because of -- these features."

You can download the full text from my Social Science Research Network page.