Beyond Cut Flowers: Developing a Clinical Perspective on Critical Legal Theory

In her Essay Professor Goldfarb examines the relationship between clinical legal education and critical legal theory. She highlights the resemblances between the two movements while elaborating a clinical educator's perspective on and critique of some of the ideas associated with critical legal studies. As the heirs to different versions of legal realism--critical legal studies being associated with "rule skepticism," and clinical legal education with "fact skepticism"-both are engaged in a project of theoretical deconstruction. For each the goal of this project is to generate a climate favorable to social change.

Professor Goldfarb, however, argues that much of the cls perspective, generated from the cloistered position of the academy, borders on being inconsequential. The new wave of clinical education theory, which engages in the inductive process of theory building by proceeding from the concrete to the general and back again, is better able to test the value of critical theory's insights and use them to effect change.