"Johnny's in the Basement/Mixing Up His Medicine": Therapeutic Jurisprudence and Clinical Teaching

Therapeutic jurisprudence (TJ) provides a new and exciting approach to clinical teaching. By incorporating TJ principles in both the classroom and out-of-classroom components of clinic courses, law professors can give students new and important insights into some of the most difficult problems regularly raised in clinical classes and practice settings. This Article will proceed in three sections. The first section briefly provides some background about TJ and how it has been employed to investigate other areas of the law.

Then, the Article discusses some of the important new theoretical developments in clinical legal education, mostly from the "critical lawyering" perspective. Finally, in the last section, the Article illustrates the use of TJ as a paradigm for teaching in the clinical law setting-both to encourage, shape, and inform classroom discussions, and to teach specific lawyering skills. We will conclude with some brief recommendations and suggestions.