On 24 January the School of Law hosted a very successful Clinical Legal Education and Access to Justice seminar in association with the Greater Manchester Law Centre and the Clinical Legal Education Organisation.

These are exciting times in clinical legal education. Several universities have recently set up or relaunched legal advice clinics, and after a six months development programme our Legal Advice Centre has a new website and a new Manager/solicitor will start at the end of January.

Twenty universities were represented at the seminar, and panel sessions were held on planned reforms to legal education and the mainstreaming of clinical legal education in the curriculum. The University of Chicago Clinical Professor of Law, Craig Futterman spoke passionately about the potential for clinical legal education to make a real difference to people’s lives. He explained how students in the Civil Rights and Police Accountability Clinic have acted on behalf of victims of police abuse and established a public database on police misconduct.

Craig had a busy two days in Manchester. The previous day he was a keynote speaker at the Law School – an event organised Manchester Police Accountability Symposium, attended by senior representatives of Amnesty International, Brandenburg Police University, Greater Manchester Police, Independent Police Complaints Commission, leading lawyers and community representatives.

Other recent developments in the School of Law, include the recent signing of a Memorandum of Understanding and Data Access Arrangement with Greater Manchester Police, and the School’s Black Lawyers Matter project which aims to address the under-representation of African and African-Caribbean Male Students studying law by way of two targeted bursaries.

Futher information can be found on the School of Law website.