14. The CLE-led climate co-curricular program

CLE does not exist only in the clinic classroom or reside solely in the semester that a student takes a clinical legal subject. The skills a student develops in a climate clinic can be repeated and refined in voluntary work that emerges from the CLE experience and which students continue during their law degree.^[1]

Climate clinical skills and approaches have been used in university co-curricular programs. The law co-curriculum comprises all the learning activities that occur at law school that are linked with, but additional to and outside of, the formal teaching programs. Commonly, the co-curriculum has a focus on professional practice, skills and contemporary issues, and increasingly it is prepared in partnership with student leaders. The focus of a law co-curricular program might include communication skills, working with diverse clients, advocacy skills (mooting or friend of the court submissions), and activism and law reform projects. Two examples of legal co-curricular activities in the climate context are the Student Law Clinics Global Day of Action for Climate Justice^[2] and the University of Queensland’s Climate Justice Initiative.^[3]

The Global Day of Action was conceived by the Baroness Hale Legal Clinic at York Law School in the United Kingdom and more than 50 clinical programs within law schools around the world have pledged to ‘rais[e] awareness of the issue of climate change in our teaching, research and activism; and to [find] ways to support law students to contribute to the struggle for climate justice’.^[4] Participating clinics are invited to organise a co-curricular activity open to all law students, not just those studying a clinic, to activate for change on a chosen issue.^[5] The purpose of the Day of Action is threefold: to show law students that they have a professional responsibility to social and climate justice and to advocate for those most vulnerable to climate change; to harness in law students their learnt capacities and skills that they can use to respond to the climate crisis; and to demonstrate to students that they are part of a global movement of concerned future legal professionals.

The University of Queensland Climate Justice Initiative is an example of a quasi-climate clinic. It has goals similar to a climate clinic, but it is not taken for credit and there is no formal learning embedded within it. It is a model, however, for law schools that do not have a large or sufficiently staffed clinical program or, as in the case of the University of Queensland,^[6] want to instil in law students an ethos of pro bono practice. The Climate Justice Initiative sits within the UQ Pro Bono Centre, which operates as a form of clearing house, connecting students with practitioners, academics and community organisations to undertake pro bono legal research assistance, especially the production of law reform submissions on areas of climate mitigation, adaptation and resilience.