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What is CSALE?

The Center for the Study of Applied Legal Education is a 501(c)(3), non-profit corporation dedicated to the empirical study of applied legal education and the promotion of related scholarship. Housed at the University of Michigan Law School , CSALE collects and distributes data to law schools and legal educators on various aspects of clinical and externship programs and the faculty teaching in them.

In the year since the publication of the data gathered in its first national survey, over 1/3rd of this nation’s law schools have relied on CSALE’s data in considering live-client clinic and externship program design, pedagogy and staffing. Scholars are also increasingly relying on CSALE’s data in their work. To learn more about CSALE’s survey click here . To read the report summarizing the data collected or request a free customized report on the data click here

Started in 2007 with a seed grant from the AALS Section on Clinical Legal Education, CSALE’s work continues today only with support of people like you and Law Schools who believe in the value of CSALE’s work. To support CSALE’s work click here. To join the growing list of Gold Circle Institutional Supporters contact CSALE by clicking here or calling CSALE’s President David Santacroce at 734.763.4319.

Gold Circle Institutional Supporters

Institutional support is critical to the functioning of CSALE and its work. CSALE thanks the following organizations that have given generously to support its work:

Albany Law School

Bellow Sacks Legal Services (Harvard)
California Western School of Law
Catholic Univ. Columbus School of Law
Chapman Univ. School of Law
George Washington Univ. School of Law
Georgetown Law School
Harvard Law School
Loyola Law School Los Angeles
Pepperdine Univ. School of Law
Southwestern Law School
Stanford Law School
Thomas Jefferson School of Law
William S. Richardson School of Law
U.C. Berkeley Boalt Hall School of Law
Univ. of Dayton School of Law
Univ. of Laverne School of Law
Univ. of Maine School of Law
U.S.C. Gould School of Law
Univ. of Wisconsin School of Law
Valparaiso Univ. School of Law
Yale University School of Law

If you would like to become an Institutional Supporter, click here.

What is Applied Legal Education?

For most of the 20th century American law schools were content to train students to “think like lawyers,” leaving the job of training students to practice law to the workplace. In the early 1960's a handful of law faculty began small experiments in applied legal education through the development of legal clinics. The goal was to facilitate a reflective and experiential learning process without the economic and efficiency pressures of the workplace, and to help students understand how the law works in action while providing sorely needed pro bono representation to the poor.

In 1969, the Council on Legal Education for Professional Responsibility (CLEPR) was formed upon the notion that "applied legal education effectively places the practitioners-to-be in the chaos of real life; sharpens their skills in this context; teaches them to triumph over emotional stress and tensions as professionals; heightens their appreciation of quality standards of practice; shows them what it is to be people-oriented; enables them to help the machinery of justice function better by their presence as lawyers in training; and, above all, exposes them to the complexities and demands of justice on the level at which it operates."

With an 11 million dollar endowment, CLEPR soon awarded grants to 209 law schools to establish live-client clinics, effectively starting modern applied legal education. In live-client clinics, students provide direct representation to clients in a wide variety of substantive contexts under the supervision of a faculty member who is also a licenced attorney. The field soon came to include a significant number of "off-site" field placement programs in which students are simultaneously taught and supervised by law school faculty and practicing lawyers in the field.