Reflecting on 50 years of Australian clinical legal education

It is now 50 years since Australia’s first clinical legal education (CLE) program started, with students and staff of the Monash University Law Faculty offering legal services to clients at the Springvale Legal Service. While there had been volunteer arrangements previously, this marked the start of students having the chance to work with clients as part of their law studies. I was lucky enough to participate in that same program nine years later and it transformed my legal education. Along with many other Monash graduates, the clinical program was the highlight of my law studies.

The websites of many Australian law schools showcase clinics and legal practice opportunities. Clinics are often developed through partnership models that involve close relationships with existing community and government agencies as well as private law firms. The 2025 Clinical Legal Education Guide published by Kingsford Legal Centre includes entries from 25 of Australia’s 38 law schools. Potential students are well aware of what they can gain from engaging in clinic-based studies, building the skills and understandings needed for ethical legal practice. They also value the chance to contribute their energy and abilities in serving their communities. Employers likewise recognise the benefits of CLE experience to enable graduates to work effectively with clients as part of a team.

Australian CLE involves a blend of community service and legal education informed by social justice, reflective practice and the well-being of law students and legal professionals. Internationally, there is growing recognition of the role CLE programs can play in universities being socially accountable to the communities they serve. Our increasingly sunburnt country has also been a major contributor to the scholarship of CLE pedagogy and practice. And the Alternative Law Journal (formerly the Legal Service Bulletin) has played a valuable part in publicising developments in Australian CLE over the years.

CLE is both a powerful and flexible pedagogy. It is interesting to see how the leaders of Australian CLE programs have had the opportunities, connections and imaginations to develop a wide array of partnerships to support new forms of CLE.

Early CLE programs

The development of Australia’s early CLE programs was part of the activist zeal of the Whitlam era and was linked to the emergence of community legal centres. It was new law schools that supported their students and staff to create these programs.

Monash Law’s link to Springvale Legal Service (now the South-East Monash Legal Service) remains strong after 50 years. Monash also developed further early clinic sites – the Doveton Legal Service operated as a CLE site from 1977 to 1980, and the Monash Legal Service opened in 1978 and continues to flourish to the present day. It became Monash Oakleigh Legal Service and is now Monash Law Clinics.

The La Trobe CLE program started in 1978 and involved legal studies students rather than law students. In 1994, La Trobe’s School of Law and Legal Studies developed a clinical partnership with Victoria Legal Aid, the first substantial Australian clinic not involving a community legal centre.

The University of New South Wales (UNSW) CLE program began in 1981 with the development of Kingsford Legal Centre, strongly supported by the University and the Law School’s Dean. It had to overcome initial opposition from the Law Society of New South Wales but became a CLE leader in running anti-discrimination test-case litigation. It later led the development of our understanding of the pedagogy underpinning CLE.

Dawkins reforms

The next catalyst for Australia’s CLE was the sweeping reforms made to Australia’s higher education sector in the early 1990s, instituted by then Labor Education Minister John Dawkins, and which resulted in rapid growth in the number of Australian law schools. This rose from a dozen in the mid-1980s to 27 in 2003 and now, in 2025, there are 38 law schools.

Of the CLE programs that developed in the 1990s, those at Murdoch University and the University of Newcastle are among the most substantial. Murdoch developed the Southern Communities Advocacy Legal and Education Service (SCALES) as a focus for building its community service to the underserved region south of Perth that included its then new campus at Rockingham. The success of SCALES was important in encouraging the federal Attorney-General’s Department to extend its support for CLE in 1999, contributing funding to four programs (Griffith, Monash, Murdoch and UNSW).

The University of Newcastle Law School characterised itself as a clinical law school and developed a CLE program option that integrated Practical Legal Training within the Bachelor of Laws degree. The University of Newcastle Legal Centre became a major public interest litigator, particularly in the area of police accountability. Newcastle offers outreach services each summer through its Law on the Beach program at a local surf lifesaving club.

Modern Australian CLE

A wide array of clinics is available to current Australian law students. Many law schools also emphasise externship-type arrangements with a wide range of public and private legal service providers. Community law and family law continue to be important areas for most CLE programs that operate their own clinic site. Street law, employment and tax-related CLE programs have also developed, along with health justice partnerships and older persons clinics.

Some Australian law schools have committed substantial time and resources to developing distinctive CLE programs. Monash University now guarantees all commencing law students the opportunity to join in its CLE program. The number of students participating in an expanding range of clinic-based opportunities more than tripled between 2017 and 2020 and now exceeds 700 per year. Kingsford Legal Centre hosts all UNSW law students to participate in a clinical component as part of their legal ethics learning. As well as providing a valuable learning experience, this introductory experience also embeds the clinic within the Law Faculty.

Partnership arrangements that involve a law school collaborating with a CLC or community agency remain prominent – all the way from James Cook University and Townsville Community Law in Australia’s north-east to Murdoch University and SCALES in the country’s south-west. The Australian National University, Griffith University and the University of Queensland all operate clinical collaborations with various CLCs. Flinders Law School has embedded a range of clinical courses and placements as core and optional aspects of both its undergraduate and postgraduate law curricula.

Various areas of human rights practice have become the subject of specialist clinics. Notable examples are migrant and refugee rights clinics, and disability rights specialisations. Another area of growth in clinics has been in creating standalone ‘law reform clinics’ in which students engage in systemic law reform either through law reform submission writing, or in public interest litigation.

Legal responses to climate change are the focus for a growing group of Australian clinics. These clinics range from broader systemic advocacy to individual case work around, for example, the installation of appropriate cooling systems in public housing, environmental and planning cases. Monash established a Climate Justice Clinic in 2018 which continues to work across areas of commercial law practice (environment and planning, administrative law, human rights) with an overarching focus on climate justice.

First Nations clinics have been developed at various law schools, including Western Sydney University and Murdoch University. They focus on both individual client work for Indigenous people as well as systemic law reform work to benefit First Nations communities. Clinics can make valuable contributions to supporting Indigenous law students while they study, as well as to the broader project of indigenising the law curriculum.

Work in a clinic can be particularly important for those students who are ‘first-in-family’ to go to university with a view to entering a profession. Clerkships and other voluntary workplace-based experiences that were once pivotal to the move from student to practitioner tend to be less available or much diminished in scope and scale. Providing clear, well-supported pathways to professional engagement through clinical law subjects enables students who lack family and social connections to access legal professional experiences that can lead to opportunities to pursue legal careers, infusing the legal profession with much needed diversity.

Prospects for Australian CLE

CLE has become a more prominent feature of Australian legal education but remains vulnerable. Along with every sector of the community, universities and educators are being challenged and transformed by generative artificial intelligence (AI). At the same time as disrupting the work of clinics, AI provides great opportunities for more effective delivery of services to clients. It may also create opportunities for clinics as sites where the use and impact of AI can be better managed than in traditional models of legal education.

CLE programs rely on effective pracademics to supervise students, yet most Australian clinicians are appointed as legal practitioners on fixed-term contracts rather than as tenured academics. Others are appointed on shorter-term sessional bases. Put simply, there is generally still a divide in law schools between clinicians and other academics. One step in overcoming this divide is for clinicians to build law school links through identifying and harnessing opportunities for impactful research, harnessing the applied opportunities generated by clinic-based client work.

The Australian CLE community should look to create national support structures. While building links across the community has not been a priority in the past decade, especially with the disruptive impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, we now need to work together to generate opportunities – to do great things that will make a difference for students, clients and communities and ensure the law and legal system is more just and accessible.