← CLEA Newsletter · Spring 2026Scholarship

The Latest from the Clinical Law Review

To promote scholarship, CLEA is now publishing abstracts from the Clinical Law Review. Read the Spring 2026 issue here.

Tamar Alexanian, Christine Speidel & Caroline Wick, Listening Midstream: Mid-Semester Feedback from Students for Clinicians, 32 Clin. L. Rev. 255 (2026).

Law schools routinely collect end-of-semester teaching evaluations. However, little guidance exists – from law schools and in the legal literature – on soliciting formative, mid-semester feedback from students. This type of feedback is particularly well-suited to the clinical setting, where teaching, supervision, and professional identity formation are intertwined. Drawing on higher-education research to show that mid-semester feedback more effectively improves engagement, learning, and instructional practice for current students, this article analyzes how mid-semester feedback aligns with core goals of clinical pedagogy, including reflective practice, metacognition, professional identity formation, and the lawyering skills of giving and receiving feedback. It then addresses common obstacles – time and bandwidth constraints, uneven or non-actionable comments, candor and anonymity concerns, and bias – and explains how design choices about goals, timing, participants, anonymity, collection modes, question forms, and framing can mitigate these problems. The article further offers concrete implementation strategies for reviewing and responding to student input in seminar, supervision, and individual meetings. Finally, it provides adaptable questionnaires to enable clinicians to embed a sustainable mid-semester feedback practice in their courses.

Tamar Ezer, Teaching a Social Justice Approach to Leadership in Law Schools, 32 Clin. L. Rev. 313 (2026).

Leadership is critical for social justice. Our law students have the potential to serve as future social justice leaders, building strong organizations and movements to carry out this work. Drawing on both leadership theory and practical examples from clinical legal education, this piece argues for a broad definition of leadership, embracing diversity and encompassing the counter-cultural values of listening and humility. It further proposes a three-dimensional model of social justice leadership, engaging the mind, heart, and spirit, and suggests teaching practices to strengthen each component. The first dimension focuses on cognitive competencies, including substantive mastery of an area of law and relevant interdisciplinary frameworks, as well as strategic thinking and project management skills. The second dimension focuses on emotional intelligence, including both personal and interpersonal competencies with an emphasis on fostering resilience, collaboration, and empathy. The final component focuses on ethics and the development of self-reflective and socially conscious practitioners, as well as energizing the spirit through the cultivation of hope.

Cara McClellan, Toward an Abolition Democracy Pedagogy in Clinical Legal Teaching, 32 Clin. L. Rev. 345 (2026).

In the spring of 2022, I was hired to create and direct a racial justice clinic at a time when many law schools had publicly identified anti-racism as a substantive gap in the legal curriculum. In the fall of 2022, I worked with four law students to design the Advocacy for Racial and Civil Justice Clinic. Early on, we determined that we would launch a clinic grounded in the principles of abolition, which I define as a clinic committed to using legal strategies to combat the legacy of slavery and white supremacy and to imagining new systems of liberation. In this article I describe what I consider to be the core components of an abolition democracy pedagogy in our clinic: (1) deep engagement with historical context to understand structural inequality today; (2) an inter-systems power analysis; (3) a place-based approach; (4) an interdisciplinary approach; and (5) the pursuit of nonreformist reforms. I conclude by offering reflections on how an abolition democracy pedagogy can better sustain future public interest attorneys committed to working in support of social movements during periods of retrenchment. Despite the prevalent backlash against racial justice today, now is a critical time for legal clinics to teach abolition and grapple with the role of litigation and policy advocacy in advancing social movements for racial justice.

Emma Sokoloff-Rubin, Centering Student Voices in the Clinic Seminar, 32 Clin. L. Rev. 391 (2026).

Clinic seminars at their best are interactive and generative. Students aren’t just receiving information; they’re contributing their own ideas and building on each other’s questions and contributions. But that’s not an easy ideal to reach. Too often, faculty end up at the center of the conversation, talking between each student, whether or not we want or intend to play that role. In this Article, I offer concrete strategies for moving away from the default pattern of classroom discourse, what education researchers call “Initiate-Respond-Evaluate” (IRE), and toward dialogic discourse, a form of conversation that centers student voices and encourages critical thinking and independent thought. I argue that dialogic discourse is particularly well suited to the pedagogical goals of clinics and to clinicians’ dual roles as teachers and collaborators. Through the lens of adult learning theory and my own experience implementing new strategies in my classroom, I demonstrate how identifying and changing patterns of classroom discourse can bring new energy to the clinic seminar and deepen student learning and engagement.

More from the Spring 2026 CLEA Newsletter