1. Introduction

Clinical legal education (‘CLE’) is a method for teaching and learning in law in which students work under supervision for real clients on real legal matters. It is an experiential learning methodology^[1] that combines student learning with community benefit. This chapter explains the types of CLE teaching that students may encounter and the benefits that students get from a clinical approach to learning about climate (and) law.

A ‘climate clinic’ is a CLE subject or program that is both about and for the climate. It is also where students must learn about themselves as lawyers in a climate-changed future. Understood this way, a climate clinic could focus on climate justice, climate resilience, climate change, sustainability or the changing environment more broadly. The law is less a focus than the purpose and methodology of the clinic. Through a process of supervisory feedback and reflection, a climate clinic^[2] provides an often rare opportunity for students in their degree to consider the ways in which they might contribute to addressing the climate crisis through their professional work, together with building skills and professional understandings to do so.

This chapter is a bit different to others in this book. Unlike areas of law considered in this collection, CLE is a pedagogy or approach to the teaching and learning of law rather than an area of legal doctrine.^[3] A climate clinic has as its focus a client problem or need — a real-world issue on which the law has a bearing — that will often require students to draw on multiple areas of study across and beyond the law school curriculum. One of the points we emphasise in this chapter is that all laws are climate laws.^[4] Year on year, the areas of law addressed by a climate clinic will change, as the needs of clients change. Again, unlike in the typical lecture theatre, CLE has core aims of addressing a client or a community need.

The chapter begins with an explanation of what is meant by the term ‘clinical legal education’, introducing the main features and benefits to student learning. While all clinical law subjects share core features, clinics vary widely in design and focus depending on the nature of the legal need or problem addressed and the learning outcomes sought, as well as more pragmatic factors such as available resourcing and university and faculty support.

CLE has been described as a ‘dynamic pedagogy’^[5] and new clinical models continue to emerge. The main Australian clinical models will be briefly outlined, with further discussion of three key climate clinics that are offered at Australian law schools, and which adopt different models for the work of the clinic and engaging students in the work of climate justice. As noted, the categories of clinic are not closed; they can — and must — respond to new needs and situations. An emergent fourth model that integrates climate justice within an existing and longstanding clinical approach demonstrates one such future possibility.

Finally, this chapter will discuss the role that co-curricular experiential opportunities, outside of the formal curriculum, can play in law students learning about and for the climate. For students without access to a climate clinic, the co-curriculum presents a place to engage in CLE for the climate.