Theses defended

Legal clinics in Argentina: a critical innovation in legal education and access to law and justice

Tamara Varas

Public Defence date
July 6, 2017
Doctoral Programme
Law, Justice, and Citizenship in the Twenty First Century
Supervision
Carlos Alberto Lista e João Pedroso
Abstract
This thesis was born from the concern to study the teaching of law from a sociological approach, to purpose the study and interpretation of legal science as part of the social system. Promoting learning based on realistic, critical, interdisciplinary and practical approaches, that together could represent an integral training which could become different profiles of professionals. In particular, this research is to study the clinical methodology in Argentina, in order to explore their contribution from two perspectives; on the one hand, the contribution that this educational tool can mean to change the limitations of the classical paradigm of teaching and, on the other hand, the real contribution that this activity represents in the process of consolidation to the right of access to law and justice.

Legal clinics emerged from the american's doctrine of legal realism and, it propose to study law from the reality, denying the characters of abstract, universal and neutral, that characterized the thought of the twentieth century. So, from this new epistemology, we propose a reflection about the teaching process and the academic formation of our future lawyers.

The empirical research to verify the proposed reflections, it happens in the most important legal clinics in Argentina, where we are going to study their work routine, institutional location, team integration, the types of disputes that they represent, the way of working with students, the potential of this methodology to intervene in the student's socialization process and the ability of these clinics to assist in the affirmation of the right of access to law and justice.

Also, the empirical experience helped us to define some abstract concepts, such as the suitability of the methodology, the student´s socialization process, the work about practices of public interest and it allowed to demonstrate the need to promote integration of knowledge in the training of lawyers, in order to entrust the society different profiles of professionals able to respond to the concerns and demands of "advanced modern society" (Giddens, 2005).