Legal Clinics: Serving People, Improving Justice

Clinical legal education provides law students with real-life work experience, develops local legal capacity, and helps protect human rights around the world. Law clinics train lawyers and law students in the spirit of social justice and public service, and provide desperately needed legal services in underserved communities.

Law clinics allow young attorneys, law students, and paralegals to provide legal or educational services to a wide array of clients, including abused women and children, refugees, people living with HIV/AIDS, prisoners, and poor rural villagers. Clinic participants work on cases involving discrimination, housing disputes, land reform, domestic violence, divorce and child custody, and consumer rights, among other issues. Law clinics also introduce students to poverty lawyering—representing the poor and disenfranchised—by helping them to understand root causes of poverty and address those causes through both legal and interdisciplinary approaches.

The Open Society Justice Initiative has helped to launch more than 20 clinics in 12 countries, from Sierra Leone to Cambodia to Afghanistan.