If we could instil social justice values through clinical legal education, should we?

Universities are more than just institutions for the transfer of knowledge; they are institutions where students learn about the world and how it works, and in clinical legal education, there is a long and persistent tradition of seeing the formation of “social justice” clinicians as a principal educational goal. This article covers three areas: we ask “Why do we believe values are formed in clinic?” and in Section II “Do values change at university and if so, how?”, examining what evidence there is for a suffi cient degree of plasticity in undergraduate populations so that values might change over a module or a year and what evidence there is that changes to values at university (if any) persist into later life. Section III takes a broader philosophical position in relation to legal education and the ethical imperatives of the teacher, asking “if we can make students believe something, is this a good thing?”