Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2019
Abstract
On June 21, 2017, I submitted a report to USAID Nove Pravosuddya Justice Sector Reform Program (New Justice) titled A Role for Regulations, Standards, Best Practices, and Monitoring in Building Strong Clinical Legal Education Programs. That report centered on an analysis of three documents: (1) the Draft Model Regulation on Legal Clinic of a Higher Educational Institution as posted by the Ukrainian Ministry of Education and Science (MOE) on April 19, 2017; (2) the Standards for Legal Clinics Functioning in Ukraine developed by the Association of Legal Clinics of Ukraine (ALCU) (hereafter Standards); (3) a draft instrument to monitor law school clinics being developed by the ALCU (hereafter Monitoring Instrument).
In my 2018 work on clinical legal education (CLE) with New Justice, I considered two documents: (1) a Draft Syllabus for a Fundamentals of Legal Clinical Practice course developed at Yaroslav Mudryi National Law University and (2) a CLE Manual on which a group of Ukrainian clinicians had worked with Iryna Ivankiv from OSCE Project Co-ordinator in Ukraine (OSCE) for some time. I worked from an English translation of the Draft Syllabus. For the multi-chapter Manual, I worked from an English translation of the Table of Contents and an oral summary of each chapter’s content.
I also had been asked by New Justice to prepare an overview of relevant international and European good practices concerning an “LCE course” for law students for use in analyzing the Ukrainian “draft curriculum” as well as presenting recommendations to stakeholders. My preliminary analysis and recommendations on the Draft Syllabus and Manual were presented at a meeting at New Justice’s Kyiv office on September 14, 2018.
While New Justice, ALCU representatives, and I discussed developments with regard to the three documents that were the subject of my June 2017 report during my September 2018 visit to Ukraine, this report does not concern the current status of these three very valuable documents or return to their substance. This report, though, continues my June 2017 report’s discussion of the role of standards, best practice, and monitoring in building strong clinical legal education programs as focusing on integration of clinical education courses in the Ukrainian law school curriculum.
Recommended Citation
Leah Wortham, USAID, Expanding and Strengthening Legal Clinical Education in Ukraine (2019).