Clinical Legal Education and Access to Justice During and Beyond COVID-19: Some Reflections of Indian Experience
| Published date | 01 January 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/23220058231207985 |
| Author | Ajay Pandey,Sushant Chandra,Shireen Moti |
| Date | 01 January 2024 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Clinical Legal Education and Access
to Justice During and Beyond
COVID-19: Some Reflections of
Indian Experience
Ajay Pandey1, Sushant Chandra1 and Shireen Moti1
Abstract
Legal education aims to impart legal skills and training to law students and develop them into profes-
sionals who can render legal services. Clinical legal education (CLE) bridges the gap between the theory
and practice of law. CLE has dual purposes of imparting lawyering skills to law students and achieving
the social justice mission of law. CLE imparts certain skills and values to students for social justice.
Students’ involvement in legal aid clinics makes them more justice-oriented, empathetic and ready for
social change. With such orientation, they can assume larger leadership roles as ‘social engineers’. The
access to justice crisis compels us to think about legal education’s scope and purpose. In this article, we
argue that CLE is indispensable for the attainment of access to justice. During the COVID-19 pandemic,
students supervised by clinicians at legal aid clinics worked with communities on issues of ‘migration’,
‘health’ and ‘education’. We argue that the COVID-19 pandemic was instrumental in revealing that legal
aid clinics can play a larger role in the attainment of access to justice even during ‘normal times’. This
article offers recommendations in order to achieve the goal of securing access to justice for the masses.
Introduction
Legal education plays an important role in socializing the next generation of lawyers, judges, and public policy-
makers. As gatekeepers to the profession, law schools have a unique opportunity and obligation to make access
to justice a more central social priority.2
Deborah L. Rhode has critiqued legal education’s inability to instil in students the professional value of
rendering pro bono services to the poor and marginalized persons and embracing the challenge of bridging
the ‘justice gap’ in society. Lawyers have a professional responsibility to provide pro bono legal services
services during law school allows students to develop the necessary legal skills and professional values to
1 O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, Haryana, India.
2
Article
Asian Journal of Legal Education
11(1) 7–19, 2024
© 2023 The West Bengal National
University of Juridical Sciences
Article reuse guidelines:
in.sagepub.com/journals-permissions-india
DOI: 10.1177/23220058231207985
journals.sagepub.com/home/ale
Corresponding author:
Ajay Pandey, O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, Haryana, India.
E-mail: ajay.pandey@fulbrightmail.org
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