The CSALE Study
CSALE conducts a long-term longitudinal study that captures significant aspects of the growth and development of applied legal education, its diverse substantive foci, its methodologies, its instructors, and its integration into the American legal academy. The study - conducted primarily through national survey every three years - paints a never before seen picture of applied legal education and educators. And because the same data is gathered every three years, the study also captures the evolution of applied legal education over time.
The Survey
CSALE's Survey of Applied Legal Education consists of three primary parts, each of which can be downloaded by clicking on the highlighted name below. The first part of the Survey is the Master Survey. It is directed to the person at every U.S. law school with primary responsibility for, or considerable knowledge of the applied legal education programs at his or her school. Questions are grouped into seven primary sections.
Section A captures important characteristics of each law school including: overall enrollment in the school, geographic region, metropolitan setting, overall enrollment in clinical and externship courses, hierarchal structure of applied legal education departments, and hiring practices for applied legal educators.
Section B provides an overview of the clinical and externship courses at the respondent's school. It does so by gathering the substantive focus of each of these courses, school policies about enrollment in such courses (required, guaranteed slots, credit limits, etc....), and trends in demands for them.
Section C gathers information and comments about institutional support for, and challenges to these courses. Section D focuses on in-house, live client clinics. It is completed for each clinic the respondent identified in Section B. Section D gathers information on, among other things: enrollment and its terms; credit load and pedagogy by course component (classroom and field work); faculty teaching in the two different components; grading procedures; pre- and co-requisites; supervision techniques; and the amount of legal services delivered by each clinic.
Section E is nearly identical to Section D except that its focus is each field placement program the respondent identified in Section B. The differences in Section E take into account the pedagogical and supervisory differences between field placement programs and live client clinics. Section F is where the respondent electronically assigns the Staffing Sub-Survey (discussed below) to every applied legal educator at his or her school. Finally, Section G collects information on promotion and retention standards for applied legal educators. Many survey participants submitted their promotion and retention standards which can be found here.
The Staffing Sub-Survey is a short survey directed at those teaching or supervising in an in-house, live client clinic or field placement program. Section A of the Sub-Survey is identical to Section A of the Master Survey and captures important characteristics of the respondent's school. Section B captures the defining characteristics of the respondent's employment, including, among other things, nature of employment (tenure, clinical tenure, long and short term contracts, etc...), promotion and retention standards, and support by, and rights within their institution.
