Conférence : University Legal Clinics: between normalisation, subversion and transformation

Location: Université du Québec à Montréal, President-Kennedy Building (PK)

Date: June 4 and 5, 2026 (hybrid format)

Co-organized by the legal clinics of Quebec universities and the University of Ottawa, in collaboration with the Réseau des Cliniques Juridiques Francophones and the Canadian Association for Clinical Legal Education.

The conference proposes to explore the inherent tensions experienced by legal clinics as they navigate between normalisation, subversion and transformation. By offering opportunities for legal clinics to exchange about experiences within a variety of contexts, including from the global south — this conference will strive to open a reflection space on the way legal clinics, despite their diverse backgrounds, develop strategies to challenge established norms, while taking a clear-eyed look at the various constraints they face.

University legal clinics emerged during a period of pedagogical protest about the way law was being taught in the United States in the beginning of the 20th century. Over the past century, the history of the legal clinic movement in North America has been greatly impacted by the social movements of the 1960s and 70s and thus moved towards an approach that became more globalised, and which progressively normalised the presence of legal clinics in North American universities. The transformation of legal clinics from being marginal entities to becoming accepted and even valued puts into question the very function of these legal clinics within the university institution, especially since this movement is not global and not all forms of clinics enjoy the same level of support. 

Today, a wide range of university legal clinic models have two main objectives: one that is pedagogical in nature and the other, which is to support public interest. Underneath these two key objectives, which appear to go hand in hand, lie tensions, including the weight and importance each clinic gives to either objective. On the one hand, not all university legal clinics have the same understanding of what “training law professionals” means. On the other hand, the public interest objective of contributing to “access to justice” or social justice is understood and applied differently. While certain clinics concentrate on the training of professionals for the labor market – with or without a focus on social justice issues –, others insist on an education which highlights the flaws and oppressions created by the justice system, the legal profession and the law itself. In reality, under this apparent dichotomy between clinic models, most clinics must find a balance between institutional reasoning and constraints of universities, faculty and students, the bar, in addition to the job market, and the political, economic and cultural context. To deal with these multiple constraints, which vary from one context to another, legal clinics tend to continuously oscillate between strategies of normalisation, subversion or transformation.