 Clinical Legal Education, Theory and Practice
Legal education, at least in the Anglosphere, has been undergoing a quiet but very recognisable transformation. The case study method, developed by Christopher Columbus Langdell at Harvard in the 1870s, is steadily giving way to ‘authentic’, ‘real life’ or ‘experiential’ learning, wherein theory and practice are intermeshed. Law is now often studied ‘in context’ (consequences, remedies, and enforcement are discussed); the gap between ‘law in theory’ and ‘law in action’ is investigated; and the ‘theory of the practice’ is incorporated into the curriculum.
Clinical legal education (CLE) takes this pedagogical approach to its logical conclusion. In CLE, law students learn through the practical application of law by providing legal services to the public and by reflecting on this experience to develop their understanding of law and legal theory. In light of the above, it is unsurprising that CLE has seen a rapid growth in the UK in the past decade. In addition to the aforementioned pedagogical shift, another driving force for this growth has been the hollowing out of public services by years of austerity politics, manifested in significant cuts in the provision of free legal services, both from the voluntary sector and from private law firms with legal contracts. These two factors combined to create a growing demand from the general public for free legal services and a growing demand from law students for some practical experience to form part of their law studies. This expansion in university law clinics has also seen a gradual move away from the law clinic inhabiting a small extra-curricular space populated by a handful of keen volunteers to larger, permanently staffed spaces where the clinic is incorporated into the curriculum, forming an assessed and credit bearing part of both undergraduate and postgraduate law programmes.
Clinical legal education is now very much a part of the twenty-first century legal education landscape, with an estimated 80% of law schools in the UK offering some form of provision. Against this background, it is somewhat surprising that there are very few textbooks available for students. It seems likely that one reason for this is that each university law clinic is unique in its offering and there is no common substantive law uniting them. A law clinic may provide advice services in one or more of the following: family law, housing, employment, criminal law, welfare benefits, special educational needs, small businesses, immigration and asylum, small claims disputes. Those services may be supervised by law school staff or by external agencies working in partnership. When you come to consider the incredible variety of models of delivery along with the range of legal topics needed, the lack of standard core textbooks becomes less surprising, as it is hard to imagine how one book might serve quite so many needs.
In addition to the incredible range of substantive law that can be found in university law clinics, the rationale for and underpinning values of law clinics are highly contested. Is the university law clinic a vehicle for developing deep critical thinking about values, power and justice in an unjust world, a vehicle for developing employability skills for budding lawyers, a way for law schools to help meet the legal needs of local communities, or can it be all of the above?
Undaunted by this landscape, we decided to rise to the challenge of creating a text that unites the theory and the practice of clinical legal education—and in doing so set out our own vision of what clinical legal education is and can be. We seek to champion a vision of clinical legal education that is radical and transformative for students and the communities they serve whilst also positioning ourselves on the side of promoting social justice through legal practice.
We explore the ways in which experiential learning can enrich the student experience, not only by developing key employability skills but also by creating a space in which theory can be applied and become meaningful.
Our proposition is that there are 6 features to clinical legal education:
- Active participation: this is the defining feature, and thus the foundation of clinical legal education. There is no room in a clinic for students to passively absorb knowledge handed to them by a lecturer. They are active participants in their own learning experience.
- Interaction in role: students play an active part in interviewing, advising, or otherwise working for a client by adopting a professional role.[CA3] By taking on such a role, students learn how to interact with others as they would in legal practice.
- The dynamic nature of the problem: in legal education, we often design neatly packaged problems for students that will draw out their knowledge and understanding of a particular point of law or practice. In clinical legal education, the problem cannot be packaged, and the solution may not be clear, which pushes the students to think creatively to apply their skills and knowledge.
- Part of a planned curriculum: this does not necessarily mean that the clinic needs to form part of an assessed programme, but to move from beyond experience to education, a clear learning goal needs to be identified for students and educators. Education requires theorising, extrapolating experiences, conceptualising and framing them, understanding them as part of a general structure, and trying again on the basis of that understanding.
- Reflection: learning how to reflect allows students to make sense of their experience and learn from that experience.
- Access to justice: this feature is present in many, but not all, clinics. Teaching students about access to justice is central to our own approaches to clinical education and is therefore also central to the book.
We live in very uncertain times, and our students come to us anxious about jobs and their futures. Many of our universities in the UK are located in cities and regions where poverty, inequality, and injustice are part of the everyday landscape. Law students are hoping to enter a world of work that is changing so fast that neither practicing lawyers nor legal academics have a clear picture of what that world will look like. It is tempting, therefore, for the legal academy to collectively put our heads down and carry on with what we have always done: give lectures, teach the black letter law, expect students to read books and judgments and sit exams at the end of the year. We hope that this book and our vision of law as a site of injustice as well as justice, clinics as a site of theory and practice, and legal practice as a form of communication and connection between people will serve to inspire and support new generations of law students and their teachers.
Featured image by Sasun Bughdaryan via Unsplash.
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 Interdisciplinary horizons in human–animal studies
Over the last few decades, scholarship in the arts has undergone a significant shift towards questions and topics related to animals and our relationships with them. Referred to as ‘the animal turn’, this movement has involved various disciplines working together to critically analyse the conceptual construction and material treatment of non-human animals (and ‘nature’ more generally) in human cultures, histories, discourses, and practices. These studies focusing on human-animal relations have been interdisciplinary from the outset, since they have required communication amongst theories and methods derived from the humanities, creative arts, and social sciences—and increasingly the biological and environmental sciences as well. Accordingly, the range of approaches that has come to be called human-animal studies (or sometimes just animal studies) has tended, even before the development of explicitly ‘intersectional’ theory, to focus on fundamentally intersectional topics, seeking to analyse, measure, and account for the inter-implicated fates and interests of specific human societies as they relate to particular animal species, populations, and individuals. These dynamics are, in turn, shaped by relevant cultural and political structures and practices.
In the context of the more politicised fields of human-animal studies (HAS), such as feminist animal studies or critical animal studies (CAS), intersectional theory often explicitly underpins interrogations of power and control in human relationships with non-human species. Importantly, in these overtly political strands of HAS, intersectional theory is extended from its original anthropocentric form to now include an examination of marginalisation, discrimination, and oppression affecting all living beings, not only humans. Speciesism refers to the ideology that prioritises humans over other animals (otherwise called human exceptionalism or human supremacy) and also favours certain animal species—such as dogs—over others, such as rats (this latter aspect of speciesism is obviously affected by cultural differences). The deliberately anti-speciesist form of intersectional theory is associated with ecofeminism, which emerged in the 1960s and ’70s, alongside other counter-cultural political movements of this era, including second-wave animal rights, environmentalism, LGBTQIA+, Indigenous, civil, and disability rights.
Specifically, feminist and critical animal studies approaches interrogate the ways in which speciesism manifests in ideological discourses as well as cultural constructions and practices. Anti-speciesist intersectional theory is also concerned with analysing and disrupting the various ways in which forms of human-to-human oppression (such as colonisation) map onto, shape, and are in turn shaped by forms of human-to-animal oppression (e.g., processes of species translocation and ecological transformation). Thus, while more human-centric forms of intersectional research have concentrated on the compounded experiences of marginalisation felt by people affected by racism, heterosexism, transphobia, ableism, and classism, it is only when we embed speciesism in intersectional understandings of oppression that we get a clearer picture of how all oppressions—of humans, animals, and environments—are intricately linked, and how humancentric constructions of ‘animality’ (or animal difference) have been used in the dehumanisation of certain peoples and in the exploitation of and cruelty towards certain animals. Intersectional feminist and critical animal studies approaches are also more likely to pair with activist or advocacy outcomes with the aim of improving the lives of animals—both human and non-human ones.
In the field of CAS, the use of multiple disciplinary perspectives and approaches in combination with anti-speciesist theory has resulted in timely and potentially transformative new knowledge of human-animal relations and human-animal-environment connections. Ongoing areas of research include:
- The employment of novel historiographies to account for the role of animal agency in historical change;
- Feminist, critical race, disability studies, and CAS theories coming together to examine the constitutive links between discourses of animal agriculture and animal breeding and human experiences of disability, exploitation, and incarceration;
- Marxist and other political theories explicating the connections between capitalism, industrialised farming, and slaughter, and the exploitation of human and animal labour;
- Indigenous critiques of environmental colonisation and the marginalisation of Indigenous human–animal knowledge systems;
- CAS and ecofeminist theories scrutinising the gendered components of dairy, meat, and egg farming and the ways that carnism, meat culture, and advertising of animal products rely on certain constructions of gender, class, sexuality, and ethnicity;
- CAS and environmental theories examining the interrelationship between animal agriculture, environmental degradation, climate change, biodiversity loss, and species extinctions;
- CAS and queer ecologies subverting mainstream environmental discourse, binary configurations of culture/nature, masculine/feminine and human/animal, and the dominance of evolutionary theory;
- Critical race and Indigenous theorists decolonising western food practices and historicising plant-based Indigenous foods;
- Various disciplines and scholar-activists are developing intersectional veganism in theory and practice.
Many of the articles in the forthcoming “Animals” section of Oxford Intersections: Environmental Change and Human Experience employ interdisciplinary, anti-speciesist, intersectional theories in their explorations of human-animal-environment entanglements, thereby offering nuanced, in-depth critical analysis of various domains of privilege, power, and control. Contributions range from theoretical, textual, thematic, and visual analyses through to empirical interviews and digital algorithm statistics. Authors utilise diverse approaches influenced by critical race, Indigenous and decolonial, queer, posthumanist, ecofeminist, ethological, social justice, cultural history, animalist, disability rights, Marxist, trans-species intersectional, and environmental justice perspectives. Those writing from Indigenous or decolonial perspectives prioritise deep relational connections with environments and non-human species.
Several exciting emerging trends in interdisciplinary HAS and CAS research are represented in articles appearing in the “Animals” section. One important trend is represented by scholars here who offer cutting-edge contemporary critiques of the animal—industrial complex, drawing on both the vast scientific evidence connecting animal agriculture to environmental degradation, diversity loss, and species extinction, and the ubiquity of cruel practices associated with breeding and farming animals for consumption. A second trend involves the scrutiny of anthropocentric environmental theories and mainstream conservation practices, demonstrating the ways in which they construct disrespect or deliberate disregard for the sentience and suffering of animals constructed as “unwanted”, such as so-called “pests,” as well as introduced and feral animals. For the most part, the authors in “Animals” are critiquing western cultural constructions and practices since these are closely connected to global animal and environmental exploitation, and because of their links to western capitalism, industrialism, and colonialism.
If you’re interested in getting involved in Oxford Intersections: Environmental Change and Human Experience, let us know.
Featured image by Jorge Maya via Unsplash.
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 Think before you tan: why sun awareness matters
Sun Awareness Week (11-17 May 2026) is the British Association of Dermatologists’ (BAD) annual week-long campaign dedicated to raising awareness of the public health risk of sun exposure, from traditional tanning to sunbed use. The week also aims to teach the public about the importance of good sun protection habits, including ways you can check for signs of skin cancer.
Tanning and sunbeds
Sun damage is normally caused by ultraviolet rays from the sun, known as UV rays.
Two types of UV rays can penetrate the Earth’s atmosphere: UVA rays and UVB rays. UVB rays are largely responsible for that perennial summer problem, sunburn. However, both types of UV rays are responsible for potentially more serious issues—specifically skin ageing and skin cancer—the most dangerous version of which is melanoma.
Tanning beds, also known as sunbeds, are well-known for allowing tanning year-round, and are also a source of those UV rays, and can provide an even greater risk for melanoma than their natural counterpart. This is because tanning beds also produce UV rays, but at a much higher concentration than normal, making tanning beds faster, but capable of far more skin damage. That is not to say that traditional tanning is safe; however, sun exposure can be harmful in any amount, to any age group.
Sun protection, prevention campaigns, and public awareness of skin health risks are vital in preventing skin cancers and premature skin ageing.
Recent research from the BAD family of journals—the British Journal of Dermatology, our educational journal Clinical and Experimental Dermatology, and our open-access journal Skin Health and Disease—offers new insights into preventing skin damage and life-threatening skin cancers. Here are some highlights.
Tanning bed trends internationally
In 2009, the International Agency for Research on Cancer classified indoor tanning as a source of Class I carcinogens—the highest level known. As a result, almost 25 countries globally have banned their use for minors—though anyone using a sun bed before their mid-thirties is at a higher risk of developing skin cancer later in life. A study published in BJD showed that Ireland is one of the countries that passed the Public Health (Sunbeds) Act in 2014. Since then, Ireland has seen a dramatic 40% reduction in registered tanning businesses. The key message of the study was that a targeted multi-pronged approach is needed to inform and stop the use of sun beds.
Although the ban on younger people who use sunbeds is helpful in pre-empting later skin cancers, tanning beds are still considered sources of carcinogens, with no safe level of exposure. In the United Kingdom, the regulation of sun beds is poor, as seen in this study, with many beds in sun tanning businesses recorded at settings far higher than the legal limit. This finding also correlates to higher melanoma rates in parts of northern England, with over 50 percent of businesses in some regions over-exposing customers.
Nail lamps and skin damage
Sun beds are not the only indoor source of UV rays. Getting one’s nails done can also pose a surprising risk of UV ray exposure through nail lamps, which help to rapidly dry gel lacquer using similar technology to full-body tanning beds. Individuals using both (ideally not at the same time) can be at risk of skin-damage conditions such as pseudoporphyria.
Sun exposure and athletes
Amongst those who spend much of their time in the sun, student athletes risk over-exposure to UV rays year-round, no matter where in the world they play. Novel research from Stanford has shown that when provided with a short video explaining the risks of sun-exposure, with the free provision of sun-protection in the areas that student athletes frequent, had a positive effect on attitudes towards sun protection usage.
Sun awareness in the medical field
Sun protection awareness campaigns can also benefit healthcare workers. An observational study from Ireland demonstrated that a digitally based sun-awareness campaign targeted at healthcare workers (857 workers completed the survey) in their places of employment raised not only raised the awareness of the importance (79%) of using sun-protection, but also increased the likelihood that healthcare workers would discuss sun protection universally.
Research has shown that clinicians emphasize the use of SPF-containing sunscreens and cosmetics, even though they also do not always meet the standard guidelines themselves. Clarification of sunscreen application guidelines, and further dissemination of the risks of the limits of cosmetics containing SPFs, may be in order—for physicians and the public alike.
Why public health outreach for sun exposure matters
Social media is emerging as an essential tool for raising awareness of the risks of sun exposure and preventing sunbed use among younger generations. Alternatively, social media has also raised interest in sun bed use—especially in the guise of ‘wellness’ and cosmetic applications. Research has shown that individuals who frequently use sun beds are more likely to sunburn as adults and participate in higher risk sun-exposure while using lower-UV ray blocking sun protection.
Acne can be the bane of any teenager—or adult. While some turn to tanning beds for temporary acne relief, adolescents can be unaware of the risks of frequent tanning bed use until the damage may be too late to prevent.
Finally, there is evidence that public health campaigns on skin cancer in both the United Kingdom and Australia have had the positive effect of steadying the rate of melanoma in young adults—especially when those campaigns are based on published research that confirmed the cancer-causing nature of ultraviolet radiation from all types of tanning.
Sun Awareness Week highlights the need for sun protection, education, and awareness about the risks that can contribute to skin cancers—not just from tanning beds. If you notice any changes to skin lesions or moles, then it is best to consult your doctor.
Contribute to the conversation this #SunAwarenessWeek and explore the latest research collection from each of the BAD journals, and check out our Patient Hub for more Sun Awareness resources.
Feature image by ClickerHappy via Pexels.
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 How do you write a comparative politics textbook for changing times?
When I studied comparative politics as an undergraduate in the 1990s, I was introduced to the field through static comparisons between national political systems. Each chapter in the textbook we read described a different country, and we learned about constitutions, legislatures, and parties as if they were fixed features of political life.
That approach has long since been overtaken by events. Today’s students live in a world where party systems are changing from election to election, new technologies are transforming political participation and communication, and authoritarian rulers are coming up with new ways of grabbing and holding on to power.
How should we teach comparative politics in this rapidly changing environment? That’s something I thought about when I sat down to write my new textbook, An Introduction to Comparative Politics. My answer has four parts.
1. Get to the key concepts and ideas right away
Scholars of comparative politics ask two big questions: why are political systems so different from one another, and how do those differences matter for people’s lives? If we help students understand why those two questions are so important and guide them as they learn about the main differences between political systems, we can put them on a life-long journey of discovery. Today’s students have easy access to reasonably accurate data on political systems via their computers and their phones, so it’s not factual information they need from us—they need concepts and ideas they can use to make sense of the information that is available to them.
2. Take a global view
The modern discipline of comparative politics developed in America and Europe in the nineteenth century, and it has long treated the institutions of North American and Western European democracies as the standard against which all other systems are measured. That attitude never made much sense, and it makes less sense today than ever, since many of today’s political challenges and conflicts have a global scope. Today’s students are eager to understand how the key concepts and ideas of comparative politics travel across continents—or, as is sometimes the case, they don’t.
3. Talk about historical change
The turn away from static comparisons between national political systems also requires that we pay attention to processes of historical change, continuities, and resurgences.
It is remarkable how much history has been repeating itself lately. Over the last two decades, leading comparativists have presented in-depth analyses of “electoral authoritarianism”—conducting multi-party elections in de facto authoritarian regimes. As Theodore Zeldin showed in the 1950s, Napoleon III’s regime in France in the 1850s and 1860s had all the hallmarks of electoral authoritarianism. Other comparativists have examined the rise of populism. Donald Trump’s rise to power in the United States has a lot in common with Georges Boulanger’s meteoric political career in France in the 1880s.
4. Emphasize data and methods
For better or worse, we live in a data-driven world, and whatever our students choose to do when they’re done studying, they’re going to need basic data literacy skills. This makes it all the more important for us as teachers to emphasize that comparative politics isn’t just a set of facts to memorize—it is a way of thinking about the world. Students need to become familiar with the main methodological approaches in comparative politics right away, including both broad cross-national comparisons and focused case studies. I therefore deemed it essential, when writing An Introduction to Comparative Politics, to present students with up-to-date data and up-to-date empirical examples in all chapters.
By learning the key concepts and ideas, taking a global view, tracing processes of historical continuity and change, and using diverse comparative methods, students can gain the independence of mind they need to make sense of politics throughout their lifetimes.
Feature image: photo by Bhabin Tamang via Pexels.
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 Knowledge and teaching in the age of information
The advent of the World Wide Web in the turn of the last century completely transformed the way most people find and absorb information. Rather than a world in which information is stored in books or housed in libraries, we have a world where all of the information in the world is accessible to everyone via computers, and in the last decade or so, via their handheld mobile device. The young people currently in university or in school grew up in a world where information is not privileged and immediate access to all of it is taken for granted. In this age of immediate and readily accessible information on any subject, we must ask: What is the role of academic institutions in teaching? If anyone can find out anything at any time, why learn anything? Is there any value to knowledge in its own right?
The answer is that of course teaching and learning are still important, but they must change to reflect the way information is accessed. The fact is that information on its own is useless without a contextual framework. It may be possible to easily find a detailed account of all of the units and commanders that participated in the Battle of Regensburg in 1809, but if the reader has no understanding of military history, and no background on the politics leading to the Napoleonic wars, this information is no different from a shopping list. Similarly, it may be possible to find detailed information on the excretory system of annelid worms, but without an understanding of what excretory systems are and what their role is in the organism, and without a knowledge of the biology and evolution of annelid worms, this information is no more than a list of incoherent technical terms.
These two very different examples serve to highlight the difference between information and knowledge. Possessing knowledge about a subject means being able to place information into a broad framework and context. People who are knowledgeable about the Napoleonic wars do not necessarily know the names of every commander of every unit in the Battle of Regensburg, but if they need this information, they can access it and use it better than someone with no knowledge. A comparative zoologist may not know all the details about annelid excretory systems, but when needed, they will know what to look for.
With this distinction in mind, I suggest that teaching and textbooks need to shift their focus from transferring information to transferring knowledge. No textbook can compete with the wealth of information available at the students’ fingertips. No course can ever impart all that there is to know about a subject. However, a good teacher and a well-written textbook can provide a much better framework for knowledge and understanding than a search engine will ever be able to. Indeed, a course or module that overburdens the students with numerous bits of information is not only a misuse of resources, it is ultimately counter-productive, as the student will always be able to challenge the teacher with a new bit of information not included in the course.
Teaching in the age of information should focus on providing a working vocabulary of a subject and on building a robust framework of knowledge. Detailed examples can be used to demonstrate principles, but this should be done sparingly. The curious students can then fill in the details on their own, taking advantage of the information at their fingertips.
I have been following these principles in my teaching of evolution and organismic biology for as long as I have been a university professor. My frustration at the details-heavy zoology textbooks led me to write a new textbook, focusing on principles and on providing a conceptual framework to organismic biology, rather than on details. For example, I have written a chapter on excretory systems that outlines what the roles and functions of this system are, and gives a few demonstrative examples of how these functions are manifested in a small number of organisms. I have included similar chapters on other systems interspersed with chapters on individual animal phyla, which give an overview of the phylum and its diversity, and present the specific variations within each of the organ systems, and how these are adapted to the life history of members of the phylum.
As we and our students continue to have easier and more readily available access to information, this new approach will provide a more successful framework for students to continue to grow and learn as they step out into the world. Hopefully this approach will be picked up by authors of additional textbooks to provide a new generation of teaching resources, more suitable for the age of information.
Feature image credit: Ilya Lukichev via iStock.
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