Towards best practices in the pedagogy of human rights clinics: Movement lawyering, its emotional impacts on students and the question of teaching resilience

This thesis investigates approaches to human rights clinical legal education that can develop the resilience skills needed by students and staff to mitigate the negative impacts of emotional distress caused by engaging with human rights violations. The thesis contends that human rights-focused Movement Lawyering as a form of Clinical Legal Education has the potential to expose human rights law students to the experiences of people who were traumatised as a result of human rights violations. Thus, while Movement Lawyering creates interpersonal connections and promotes diverse skill-building, this type of experiential pedagogy may at the same time play a role in inducing negative emotional experiences in research students. The possibility of exposing law clinic students to emotional stress necessitates that human rights law clinics include lessons in their curricula that educate students on the realities of human rights work and prepare them to manage their emotions in such settings. The thesis identifies and responds to a gap in traumatology literature, and in research studies on the negative emotional effects of human rights work on clinic students. The literature on emotional resilience is ambiguous and does not offer clear-cut methodologies for teaching students how to manage their emotions in stressful situations. The thesis used three methods of enquiry to propose solutions that may enable law clinics to better prepare human rights students for their professional careers. The methodology involved auto-ethnography and other qualitative methods of researching a case study of the Human Rights Law Clinic at the University of Galway, Ireland. It examined students’ reflective essays, and the findings of interviews conducted with LLM students and former professional human rights careerists. The interviews provided knowledge about how students conducted movement lawyering projects, and the effects of those projects both positive and negative on their emotional wellbeing. The findings from the research indicated that Movement Lawyering as a basis for clinical education, as it is utilised in the Human Rights Law Clinic at the University of Galway, is a positive platform for incorporating skills of emotional resilience. The Human Rights Law Clinic was deliberatively designed using a movement lawyering model, and it already significantly incorporates consideration of emotional resilience and therefore is poised to engage with ongoing reform to adapt to student needs, such as the guided recommendations for improvements in future human rights law clinics that are provided in this thesis. The recommendations are structured such that they can be replicated and adapted according to the educational requirements of university law schools globally.

Publisher

University of Galway

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CC BY-NC-ND

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Collections

University of Galway Theses (PhD Theses)