Alle origini delle cliniche legali nella formazione del giurista statunitense: tra nativismo e New Deal

Abstract

The Origins of Legal Clinics in U.S. Legal Education: Between Nativismand the New Deal – This paper plunges into the issue of the origins of legal clinics in U.S. legal education by employing the comparative methodology. The author sets forth
the following propositions. First, that the legal clinics’ birth must be traced back to 1893, with the appearance of the first legal dispensary at the University of Pennsylvania, rather than during the New Deal, or later in the ’60s, as the mainstream
literature on the topic argues. Second, that clinical legal education, in its very nature, had no political significance in terms of social values. Indeed, from the very beginning, legal clinics have been deemed to be almost exclusively an educational tool, rather than an instrument for political battles, as maintained, for instance, by Duncan Kennedy. In this respect, this paper takes the argument that the sole relevant social role legal clinics played was, in connection with legal aid societies, a nativist one: i.e., combatting immigration and subversive movements during the first two decades of 20th century.