Group to Urge Law School To Grant Academic Credit For Practical Field Work

A student-faculty committee at the Harvard Law School will recommend next month that the Law School give academic credit to students who engage in public service legal work outside the classroom, so long as it is combined with an academic classroom program of education.

The proposal, which would represent a sharp change in teaching practices at the Law School, will have to be passed by the Law School faculty before going into effect.

"Our goal here is to achieve an integration of clinical and academic work," Professor Frank E. A. Sander, chairman of the committee said yesterday. "We'd like to create a fusion between practical experience in the field, and pure academics in the classroom."

Sander's committee has been studying proposals that would give academic credit for clinical legal work, the term given to actual involvement of law students in such areas as Legal Service Bureaus and welfare offices.

"I feel exposure to the way the system works is crucial in some fields for the student to get a true flavor of the subject," Sander said. "At the same time, I feel there is a certain benefit to be had from analyzing cases in the classroom set-up."

Sander said he opposed programs which allowed students to get a full semester's credit for work done outside the Law School. "These so-called 'externship' programs where the student goes off for six months to work in some agency or Legal Service Office, haven't worked," Sander said.

Problems at Yale

"It's hard to find good supervisors, people who will try to give the student academic guidance, and students have not responded to these programs where they've been tried. For example, at Yale, only three or four students have volunteered to spend a full semester working in the field," he added.

Sander said that his committee would recommend that "a limited amount of credit be given for clinical work."

"There are two ways to do this," he said. "We can allow students in existing courses to do related field work for additional credit, or we can analyze clinical experiences people have had in the classroom. The key factor is the interplay between the academic and the practical methods of learning law."

Sander said that Gary Bellow, a professor at the University of Southern California Law School, who has instituted a program for clinical work there, would be a visiting professor at Harvard next year.

"We're hoping he can put through a program here similar to the one he engineered at USC," Sander said.

Bellow's program calls for law' students to take a "clinical-semester"which is divided into three parts. The student begins the semester by gathering background material on a specific subject, then works on a simulated problem, and finally, does clinical work in his area of interest.

Optimism

Student members of the committee expressed optimism that the reforms would benefit the Law School.

"Most students here already put in eight to ten hours a week doing clinical work, and it's good that they'll get credit for," Robert J. LeClair, a third-year law student said yesterday. "At the same time, students will get the benefit of critically analyzing cases in the classroom."