European Standards for Clinical Legal Education

Since 2018, ENCLE is engaged in an open process to create a common set of Standards for Clinical Legal Education (CLE) in Europe. The main aim is to provide some guiding principles on CLE to law clinics in Europe. While this process is still very much open and under discussions, some specific outcomes have been achieved so far:

• The concrete idea to develop a common set of European CLE standards were launched after the ENCLE Conference in Turin in 2018, where a plenary sessions (see the video and the summary of the Turin plenary session) took place on CLE standards.
• After this, a first workshop was held in Valencia in January 2019 where a number of European clinicians met to discuss the development of European CLE standards (see summary of the Valencia roundtable).
• In the meantime and in the frame of the STARS project (Skill Transfers in Academia: a Renewed Strategy - an Erasmus+ project), the law clinics engaged in the STARS project developed a draft set of CLE standards/guidelines, which served as an example for the ENCLE discussions on standards.
• A second ENCLE standards workshop was then held in Bratislava in July 2019 (see the summary of the Bratislava workshop), which comprised a plenary sessions and discussions in thematic groups.
• The Standards had been further discussed at a virtual Workshop hosted by the Letterkenny Institute of Technology in October 2020.  It was generally considered that the Standards produced as a consequence of the STARS project could largely be adopted by ENCLE. 

ENCLE aims to finalise the discussion about a European document on CLE standards in 2021-22. Please do not hesitate to share your comments and suggestions related to the “ENCLE Project on European Standards for Clinical Legal Education” (regarding the general objectives, the process used so far and/or content) by sending an email to:  encle.cle.standards@gmail.com . 

For this reason, ENCLE is organising a round table discussion on standards on Friday November 5th @ 9am GMT/10am CET. This round table discussion (duration of ca. 2h) will allow national Clinical Legal Education networks to address their opinion on the ENCLE Project on European Standards for Clinical Legal Education. Interested persons need to register by filling in the registration form.