This strand examines how clinical legal education can enrich both legal learning and access to justice. At the University of Westminster Legal Advice Clinic, students provide free advice to the public in housing, family, employment, and immigration law under the supervision of practising solicitors and barristers. Alongside direct service, we explore how clinics contribute to student resilience and professional identity formation, ensuring that experiential learning supports both academic and personal development. Research also considers the challenges of sustainability and wellbeing in clinical legal education and the role of clinics in widening access to justice.
Our Street Law initiatives provide further opportunities for students to develop communication, advocacy, and civic engagement skills by delivering workshops that make the law accessible to schools, colleges, and community organisations. Research in this area examines how public legal education strengthens students’ professional competencies while fostering social responsibility and community empowerment.
Work on mediation and alternative dispute resolution (ADR) considers how students can be trained in skills of negotiation, problem-solving, and conflict resolution that are increasingly valued in legal practice. This includes embedding mediation training within the curriculum and assessing its impact on graduate employability, ethics, and client-focused lawyering.
Taken together, this strand highlights how clinical legal education, Street Law, and mediation not only provide transformative student experiences but also generate rich areas of empirical and theoretical research into skills development, wellbeing, justice, and the future of the legal profession.
For more information, please contact Anna Steiner at [email protected], Lughaidh Kerin at [email protected] or Marc Mason at [email protected].