Book Review: Clinical Legal Education in Asia. Edited by Shuvro Prosun Sarker
| DOI | 10.1177/2322005816640344 |
| Published date | 01 July 2016 |
| Date | 01 July 2016 |
| Author | Frank S. Bloch |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Book Reviews
Clinical Legal Education in Asia. Edited by Shuvro Prosun Sarker, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2015,
250 Pp., US$100, ISBN 978-1-137-51753-1.
Clinical Legal Education in Asia follows a similar volume edited by Professor Sarker, Legal Education in
Asia (2014), this time focusing on the history and development of clinical legal education in the region.
Professor Sarker was rst urged to take on this project by one of his professors, Dr N. R. Madhava
Menon, whose inuence can be seen not only in the chapter on India, as India’s leading proponent of
clinical legal education, but also in the very concept and structure of the book, as one of the founders and
guiding lights of an exciting and expanding global clinical movement that has seen the reach of clinical
legal education expand to every region of the world. With its broad but individually distinctive coverage
of clinical legal education in 12 Asian countries written by an impressive eld of 22 national and inter-
national clinicians, Clinical Legal Education in Asia is an important addition to the growing body of
scholarship on the concepts and inuences of clinical legal education around the world.
As with any compendium of separately authored chapters intended to cover a specific subject—in this
case, clinical legal education in Asia—the book’s success depends on both the quality of the individual
chapters and the coherence of its overall content. Here, Professor Sarker has managed to pull together a
series of what amount to separate and independent national studies that not only inform the reader about
different conceptions of clinical legal education around the region and the challenges clinicians face
while furthering clinical programmes in the various countries represented, but also offers the reader
insight into an emerging Asian clinical movement that has and will continue to contribute to the growth
and development of clinical legal education worldwide.
An introductory chapter sets the scene by identifying certain ‘Asian characteristics’ of clinical legal
education that, while documented with national experiences in succeeding chapters, are also the broad
characteristics of clinical programmes in other regions of the world. Asian clinicians, for example, seek
to move away from the ‘one-way transmission of knowledge’ so common with traditional methods of
law teaching by offering law students more interactive and experiential opportunities to develop their
own understanding of the law and how it works in society. More broadly, Asian clinics seek to empower
law students as future agents of social change and to encourage them to develop a personal sense of
public professional responsibility.
As with global trends in clinical legal education, the wide variety of legal, educational and political
institutions present in the region—not to mention cultures—require a fluid definition of clinical pro-
grammes and a flexible set of circumstances under which those programmes are carried out. A number
of familiar and mostly complementary goals are at the heart of how clinical legal education is defined
across the region: providing students previously non-existent professional skills training, improving the
quality of law teaching through a shift to experiential teaching methods, increasing student aware-
ness and commitment to their public professional responsibility by exposing them to the real-world legal
needs of the community and enhancing links between the legal academy and the profession through
Asian Journal of Legal Education
3(2) 216–218
© 2016 The West Bengal National
University of Juridical Sciences
SAGE Publications
sagepub.in/home.nav
DOI: 10.1177/2322005816640344
http://ale.sagepub.com
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