Legal clinics in the UK and Ireland: past, present and future

This chapter looks at clinics in the constituent parts of mainland UK, or Great Britain as it is technically known and those in Ireland, both the Republic and Northern Ireland. Clinics, in their various guises, have increasingly become an integral part of law school offerings across the vast majority of law schools in the UK and Ireland. Many aspects of clinic and related educational development have also been exported and proven helpful elsewhere, especially through training and other support projects.

In this chapter we set out the key developmental issues that appear to have shaped clinical provision in these jurisdictions, including the overall aim of clinics – be those educationally and/or social justice-oriented - regulatory changes and educational developments, and the implications all of this has had and may well have in the future.
We briefly recall the history of clinical legal education (CLE) in general and law clinics in particular, in the UK and Ireland. We differentiate between the situation in England and Wales, then we consider Scotland, followed by some specific comments on the Welsh clinical scene and finally CLE on the island of Ireland – that is both in the Republic of Ireland and in Northern Ireland.