Lawyers in self-estrangement: resolving the challenges of sustaining university law clinics

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the challenges encountered by university law clinics in their legal aid projects that are designed to assuage national access to justice deficits. Towards the resolution of these challenges, it proposes a sustainability paradigm that bears significant implications for lawyers, legal educators and other clinic collaborators. The article begins by locating the pragmatic, moral and legal underpinnings of the social justice mission of university law clinics. The subsequent analysis of legal aid provided by universities is supported by data on clinic activity collected through interviews of clinic directors and focus group discussions with student leaders in university law clinics in Kenya. The findings reveal the multiple challenges that clinics confront as being in leadership, lack of representational capacity, inadequate resourcing, under-explored potential, poor institutional synergies and sub-optimal placement in university structures. The article then establishes a link between these setbacks and the sustainability of the clinics, arguing that reframing the problem in Kenya as one of sustainability yields potential avenues for addressing the challenges in ways that are progressive and impactful.