Clinical Professor Allison K. Bethel, director of John Marshall’s Fair Housing Legal Support Center & Clinic has become co-chair elect of The Association of American Law School’s Section of Clinical Legal Education. Her co-chair is UCLA Law Professor Scott L. Cummings.
Bethel and Cummings were installed as co-chairs elect of the Section at the January 2017 AALS Annual Meeting in San Francisco.
“This is an exciting opportunity for me to really help shape the dialog on clinical legal education in this new era,” Bethel said. “Law school clinics have always been around, but in the last three – to four years, there has been an increased recognition of the importance of clinical legal education. We have recognized that it helps students become more practice-ready.
Bethel, who joined the John Marshall faculty in 2008, notes that John Marshall has long been a leader in experiential and clinical legal education, requiring students to have three credits in one of the school’s nine legal clinics or as an externship. The ABA has only recently started requiring law students to satisfy six credit hours of experiential learning.
“There now is a new emphasis on how experiential learning works in conjunction with doctrinal courses,’ Bethel said.
Bethel has been in leadership positions with the Section on Clinical Legal Education since 2011. From 2011 to 2013 she served as Co-Chair of the Section’s Clinicians of Color subcommittee. In 2014 she was a Working Group Leader for the Clinical Conference and was elected to the Section’s Executive Committee. In 2016, she was the Section’s Secretary.
John Marshall’s Fair Housing Legal Support Center & Clinic is dedicated to educating the public about fair housing law and providing legal assistance to private or public organizations that seek to eliminate discriminatory housing practices.
