Reflections on clinical legal education at Kingsford Legal Centre

Thinking about the role that Kingsford Legal Centre (KLC) has played in relation to clinical legal education, I wondered ‘what if there never been a KLC?’; how might clinical legal education in Australia might have been different.

That’s actually an interesting question to ask of many other things, such as legal education more generally (it’s more diverse and experiential than it might have been otherwise), anti-discrimination law (it’s more developed than it would have been otherwise), and hundreds of alumni (they are in careers in public and community legal service that they might not have pursued otherwise).

KLC is a rare example in Australia of the dominant clinical model in the United States, the ‘in-house live client clinic’ (the dominant model in Australia is the much-more-affordable external placement approach).  Clinic in the US is to a very large extent concerned with preparing students for practice, but in Australia it has a strong, almost exclusive, social justice focus.

That social justice focus is due in large part to the approach of Monash Law School’s clinic Springvale Legal Service which was the model for KLC.  Without KLC, the clinic at Springvale may have remained an anomaly; the establishment of KLC helped to spread the idea that legal education can be – should be? – engaged, focused on social justice, and service-oriented.

At a time when , the staff of Monash/Springvale and UNSW/Kingsford were the only ones doing this thing called clinic. they discussed, compared and collaborated.  When KLC hosted the second national conference in 1991, it was the beginning of a national profile for clinical legal education; there were just three clinical programs then, and there are close to 30 now, as KLC’s guide shows.

KLC has been an integral part of the theoretical and practical development of clinical legal education in Australia and internationally, through research reports, surveys, guides and articles, and the thought leadership of its staff.  The theoretical contribution reached its peak recently, with Anna Cody’s KLC-inspired doctoral thesis, ‘Forming lawyers for justice: the role of clinical legal education in developing reflective lawyers’.

KLC has been an innovator on the practical side of clinical legal education, too.  One example is the exposure of every law student in a degree program to at least one ‘clinical’ encounter with a client.  Long standing points of difference and debate between the Springvale and Kingsford clinics – traversed not only in conversations but in publications and reports – are whether and how to grade students, and whether and how a student should convey legal advice to a client without supervision.  Such innovation and debates have been essential to the development of world-class clinical practice in Australian law schools.

So, my thought experiment suggests to me that if there had never been a KLC, there might have been less clinical legal education across Australia, less scholarship, less innovation, and less focus on social justice. What a good thing there has been – and still is – a KLC.

Published in Kingsford Legal Centre, 40 years of Impact, 2021