Clinical Legal Education in the Middle East and North Africa

Abstract This chapter examines the development and role of legal clinics in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), arguing that clinical legal education has emerged in the region as both a tool for legal education reform and a mechanism for expanding access to justice despite challenging political and institutional contexts. Across the region, global trends in experiential legal education are increasingly taking shape. Many law schools operate legal clinics, which enable law students to perform legal functions under the supervision of practice-oriented professionals, while others are in the process of launching clinical programs. The chapter describes how a number of these clinics function in environments characterized by authoritarian governance, war, transitional post-conflict conditions, persistent political instability, or foreign occupation, whether in the Levant, the Maghreb, or the Gulf States. In many instances, clinical legal education has been introduced through partnerships with clinicians from the international community or through international development and aid organizations. It demonstrates that these initiatives have helped revive clinics that had become dormant following the withdrawal of international personnel or funding, or due to limited institutional support from faculty administrations and the broader legal community, and notes that universities have established clinics for different reasons: to address local societal needs, through the initiative of individual faculty members seeking to introduce experiential learning, or as part of institutional competition and the growing recognition of clinical programs as a best practice in legal education.