Abstract:
In order to contain the spread of the novel corona virus, the state governments across the country began shutting down colleges temporarily around second week of March this year. It has been approximately two monthsand it is highly uncertain as to when the colleges will reopen. This tough time of pandemic followed by the lockdown around the globe has rendered the clinical legal education methods and programs ineffective. The most used ways of clinical teaching by jigsaw groups , pairing and sharing , tabula rasa , fishbowl approach , mock trials, client counseling etc have become ineffective. Hence we need to ponder over running clinical legal education programs in online mode. The online mode has its own advantages and disadvantages and learning by doing may require serious brain storming. The model of online education has brought the entire world together on one platform and anything and everything around the globe is in our reach for eg.world’s best clinical professors can train professors of other countries without incurring much cost and is time saving too. The idea of virtual legal aid clinic , Intellectual Property Rights clinic , constitution law clinic, human rights clinic is possible but clinicians need to learn how to operate these clinics well in online mode. In many countries the whole clinical legal education programs has crashed because of online education and inability of professors to cope up with these new challenges.
In this paper researcher will try to discuss about the best practices of Clinical legal education which is possible in online mode and will also discuss how the world need to change it’s traditional clinical legal education programs and cope up with the challenges of going online. This paper will like to suggest a blueprint of clinical legal education in Online mode.
Speaker:
Prof. Niteesh Kumar Upadhyay, Assistant Professor of Law, Galgotias University India and founder of Indian Network of Clinical Legal educators
He has done his LLM from WBNUJS, Kolkata. At college level, he has won various awards in moots, quiz and debates. He has also presented papers at various national and international level seminars and conferences. Along with this, he has also conducted several workshops. His numerous works have also been published at various journals. He is the founder of knowledgesteez.com and has mentored several other endeavors. He is a part of the Editorial Boards of different journals of Legal Research and Study like Journal of Comprehensive Legal Research, West Minster Law Review and Dibrugarh Law Journal, Youth Policy Journal (U.K). He received various scholarships in past including GAJE Turkey, ILEC New York, HAGUE Academy Netherlands, Gaje Mexico , Xiamen China, Rene Cassin France etc. In year 2015 he was awarded with title of social change maker 2015, Young Humanitarian Award 2017 , Youth for Human Rights Award 2017