Designing Digital Law Clinics for Student Success

Curryer, Emma and Edwards, Carol (2025). Designing Digital Law Clinics for Student Success. In: Baxter, Jacqueline; Selby-Fell, Helen and Gilbert, Andrew eds. Creativity and Critique in Digital Learning and Teaching: Insights for Learning Design in Business and Law. Palgrave Macmillan Cham, pp. 249–268.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-68086-1_11

Abstract

The Criminal Justice Clinic (CJC) is a digital law clinic that was designed, and is now taught, as part of the module ‘Justice in Action’. The CJC was developed for two reasons: to further social justice by assisting clients that state they have been wrongly convicted of serious criminal offences and to provide students with employability skills required in professional legal practice. Students research and advise on live criminal cases under the supervision of a solicitor, applying legal principles to determine whether there are any grounds on which to make an appeal. Although criminal justice clinics exist at other universities, the OU’s CJC is an innovative project as it aims to teach students legal professional skills in a digital only setting. This chapter covers why and how the CJC was created, the importance of employability skills to students participating in such a project, and how the clinic’s learning design was developed to maximise student success.

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