professional responsibility, student practice, and the clinical

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the way people learn. 9 But unless the criticism is palpable to the client, it is
not intervention in the sense that the clinic teacher has directly assumed
responsibility for performing the lawyering activity in question."°
I use the term "clinical teacher" to denote one who has obligations of a
professional nature to the client but, unlike the supervising attorney operating
9. For a discussion of cooperative versus competitive and coercive teaching in the law
clinic, see Condlin, Socrates' New Clothes, supra note 6. Condlin stresses the value of
interacting and communicating in a "learning" rather than a "persuasive" mode in order to
avoid teacher domination and manipulation of the student. The learning mode is
characterized by the identification, disclosure, and non-coercive discussion of value
preferences implicit in teaching; the persuasive mode is "hide the ball" teaching whose
objective is to convince others while minimally disclosing one's values, motive or purpose
and without considering the other's ideas or views. Condlin argues that too much clinical
teaching is of the persuasive mode variety and therefore not distinguishable from the more
manipulative (Socratic) classroom techniques clinical teachers profess to avoid. But see
Spiegelman, supra note 1, at 246-47 ("[E]xcept in clinics and practice-skills courses, in
teaching about alternative dispute resolution, and in humanistic approaches to legal
education, cooperation is largely neglected .... " See R. JACK & D.C. JACK, supra note
3 (for a general discussion of the failure of traditional law school teaching methods to help
students confront and bridge the gap between professional ethics and personal morality).
The authors argue that law schools model what they teach on, an adversarial system, and
that traditional combative teaching techniques must be modified or supplemented with more
cooperative, less alienating forms of instruction. Id. at 44-47, 166-67.
10. Professor Condlin defines clinical practice instruction as "strategic intervention
by law teachers in student performance of lawyering tasks." Condlin, Socrates' New
Clothes, supra note 6, at 223. He defines intervention more broadly than I by reference to
the following concept: "[In intervening] ... a [teacher] ... assists a [student] to become
more effective in problem-solving, decision-making and decision implementation in such a
way that the [student] can continue to be increasingly effective in these activities and have
a decreasing need for the [teacher] .... " See Condlin, id. at 223 n.1 (quoting C. ARGYRIS,
INTERVENTION THEORY AND METHOD: A BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE VIEW 15-16 (1970)).
Condlin believes it is preferable to intervene non-coercively. See supra note 9. However,
he acknowledges that there are ethics-driven instances in clinical education when coercive
behavior on the part of the teacher would be appropriate: "For example, if a student fails
to contact a client to close material gaps in the client's story and the deadline for filing
pleadings approaches, the teacher may raise his voice or tie the failure to contact the client
to some external sanction. These actions are coercive, in that they are threats rather than
new substantive arguments about the correctness of contacting the client but would often be
appropriate for letting the student know that client interest in competent representation takes
priority over student freedom to choose whether to be competent." Id. at 239 n.42. Even
coercive direction of this kind is not intervention for purposes of my discussion because it
does not entail direct intervention between student and client in the sense that the clinic
teacher actually "takes over" performance of the lawyering task from the student.