I first heard about Dr Menon in 1985 while looking into the role Indian law schools might be playing in the delivery of legal aid to local communities. I was a young associate professor at Vanderbilt University Law School, where I had taken over as director of Clinical Legal Education after working as a lawyer in a rural legal aid programme in California and serving as an instructor at the University of Chicago’s legal aid clinic. I was about to become eligible for my first sabbatical leave and was hoping to find a suitable home for exploring approaches to collaboration between law schools and legal aid programmes in the Indian context. At the time, hardly any US-based clinical law teachers worked internationally and the idea of collaborating cross-nationally was far outside the mainstream. But I was quite sure that I could benefit personally and professionally from such an exchange, so I thought I would give it a try. I did not really think beyond that, to the possibilities for a broader global clinical movement. But as it turned out, I was about to head to where it all began. That is because my search led me directly to Dr Menon.

NR Madhava Menon began his academic career at Aligarh Muslim University, Faculty of Law, before moving on to a professorship at Delhi University, Campus Law Centre, where he directed the Students’ Legal Services Clinic. In the early 1980s, he spent a year in the US as a Fulbright scholar studying at Columbia University and joining in workshops and conferences at Northwestern University and the University of California, Berkeley. Based in part on that experience, and also on the legacy of a Ford Foundation project in the 1970s that supported visits to India by prominent American law faculty, Dr Menon promoted general reform of Indian legal education including the introduction of Socratic methods to replace traditional lectures. But more dramatically, he championed clinical education both for its skills training capacity and for its social justice mission. Clinical legal education was becoming institutionalised in the US in the 1970s and 1980s, and Dr Menon has credited his Fulbright year with providing him the opportunity ‘to learn from the American experiences and to interact with clinicians from that country’.Footnote 1 By the time I joined him at Delhi University as a Fulbright visiting professor in the fall of 1986, he was head of the Campus Law Centre and the law school’s legal aid programme was well established as a resource for legal services. Although clinics had not been fully incorporated into the academic programme, the incorporation of social action into future lawyers’ professional education, for example by placing legal aid clinic students at lok adalats (also sometimes referred to as ‘legal aid camps’), was a fundamental element of Dr Menon’s view of law schools’ central educational mission.Footnote 2

After a period of adjustment, during which I was embedded in the legal aid programme and also occasionally gave guest lectures in skills-related courses taught by my new colleagues, I was tasked with drafting working papers on various topics that could eventually be included in some sort of manual for clinical law teachers in India. Thus began my first truly international clinical legal education experience, which seemed to me a completely natural collaboration between the two of us. What struck me only after I left India at the end of the year was how generous it was for Dr Menon to have invited me into such an important part of his life’s work. Nor did I understand until a few years later the scope of the undertaking he had in mind. While I was encouraged to share with the Indian legal community some of my views on clinical legal education and social justice lawyering and how they might be of relevance in the Indian context,Footnote 3 it was when Dr Menon took over as the founding chancellor of the National Law School of India University (NLSIU) in Bangalore that the story of the global clinical movement — and more specifically, the Global Alliance for Justice Education (GAJE) — began.

The key event was a three-week workshop for Indian clinical law teachers that Dr Menon organised in late 1995, not long after he had founded NLSIU. Unlike with most such workshops, he invited faculty not just from India and neighbouring Bangladesh, but also from Australia, the US, and England. The spirit of the workshop has been described by one of the American participants as follows:

The course was taken by about 25 law teachers and lawyers from South Asia and had an international faculty.… Although this group of teachers collectively shared decades of experience in clinical education, we all agreed that the course at the National Law School was an exciting venture different than anything we had previously known in several respects:

  1. 1.

    The participants were neither entry-level law teachers hired specifically to do clinical teaching nor clinical specialists but were mostly conventional law teachers — generally senior members of law faculties, including a number of deans, who were eager to learn about this new mode of legal education. Some participants were not academics but rather senior members of the profession. For example, several members of the Bar Council of Bangladesh participated.

  2. 2.

    The course was a very serious study of clinical teaching methodology that lasted three weeks. By way of contrast, workshops on clinical pedagogy for new law teachers in the US typically are a day long and clinical education conferences in the US rarely last more than five days.

  3. 3.

    The course was an opportunity for experienced teachers from different countries to learn from each other and in turn to offer to participants information about clinical teaching that was broader than any one country’s experience.Footnote 4

In his introduction to the reading materials provided to the participants, Dr Menon noted that while universities and law colleges in India had been experimenting with practical training programmes since the abolition of compulsory apprenticeships in 1964, large numbers of law graduates were still entering the profession ‘with hardly any exposure to court procedures and litigation skills’ and many do ‘not know even the basics of court manners and professional ethics’.Footnote 5 He went on to note that even though, at the time, there was the possibility of bringing back a one-year compulsory apprenticeship, ‘even after such a reform, the need for clinical experience during legal education will remain an integral part of meaningful professional legal education.’ Of particular relevance here, he set out the consequent challenge going forward within a global framework: ‘As such, it is desirable for progressive law schools to evaluate the experience of the past, look at the experience of law schools in other developed countries and evolve alternative models, viable and relevant in the Indian context.’Footnote 6

Dr Menon’s commitment to cross-national collaboration in the development of more effective and sustainable clinical legal education in India could be seen in his description of the continuing evolution of the clinical programme at NLSIU, which he put forward as an example for the workshop participants: ‘With inputs from some Visiting Clinicians from English and American Law Schools and with specialised training of a section of the Faculty acquired through exchange programmes in select law schools abroad, NLSIU could make a positive breakthrough in clinical legal education.’Footnote 7 At the same time, he made it clear to the workshop participants that a global perspective was vital to the broader clinical community by including among the stated objectives of the workshop the study of ‘the theory and practice of clinical teaching now prevalent in American and English Law Schools’ and listing among the workshop’s expected outcomes ‘[a] high degree of familiarity with current practices in clinical teaching around the world’.Footnote 8

The inclusion of articles by both international and Indian clinical law teachers in the workshop materials and the full integration of the international and Indian faculty in the substantive workshop sessions further demonstrated his belief in the value of a global perspective on clinical legal education. A sampling of the workshop sessions provides insight into Dr Menon’s global perspective on training clinical law teachers.Footnote 9 While the workshop began with an overview by Dr Menon of clinical legal education in India, the next two days were devoted to presentations by the participants of the status of clinical education in their law schools and descriptions of concepts and theories of clinical learning and teaching internationally. During the second week there were sessions on various clinical subjects, including fact investigation, interviewing and negotiation, and key clinical methodologies such as supervision and evaluation. Each included demonstrations and exercises run by teams of Indian and international workshop faculty. The same global approach was brought to later sessions on clinical legal education’s social justice mission, which were preceded by a day-long excursion during which the workshop participants could observe, join in with, and evaluate NLSIU’s clinic programme at a local lok adalat.

I and the other workshop faculty realised at the time that this global approach to what is known in the field as a training-of-trainers, or TOT, workshop was more than just unusual. As one of the international faculty noted recently, she ‘admired the focus and energy that Dr Menon exacted from the experienced group of western clinical professors as well as from our law colleagues from India and the region’.Footnote 10 But it proved to be more consequential than we, or perhaps even Dr Menon, imagined. By transforming what until then had been traditionally a locally focused training into a cross-national and cross-cultural exchange of ideas and experience where participants from around the world can both train and learn from each other, Dr Menon had demonstrated for the first time the potential power of global clinical education.Footnote 11

The next and probably more directly consequential step in this story relative to the creation of a global clinical movement followed directly from the success of the NLSIU workshop. Professor Clark Cunningham, one of the American faculty at the workshop, arranged for Dr Menon to deliver the keynote address at the 1996 clinical conference of the Association of American Law Schools in Miami, Florida. Professor Cunningham had known Dr Menon for as long as I had; coincidentally, he spent a year in India researching public interest litigation at the same time I was teaching at Delhi University. He knew, therefore, that Dr Menon’s global view of clinical legal education would greatly contribute to the conference theme, billed as ‘Expanding the Frame: Crossing the Border to Other Countries and Disciplines’.Footnote 12 And it was during that conference, with Dr Menon present along with a few internationally minded American clinicians such as Professor Cunningham and me and a smattering of international delegates from outside the US, that the idea of a global clinical organisation that could facilitate information sharing and collaboration among clinicians around the world was formed.

Formal institutionalisation of a global clinical movement took a few more steps, but Dr Menon’s vision of global clinical legal education remained the guiding principle. There was a follow-up working group meeting in Sydney, contacts with the Ford Foundation for possible support, and the setting up of communication among a core group of organisers using a then-novel email listserv. In the spring of 1997, a mission statement was adopted for what would become GAJE.Footnote 13 That mission statement, which remains GAJE’s mission statement to this day, was stated as follows:

GAJE is GLOBAL, seeking to involve persons from as many countries in the world as possible, avoiding domination by any single country, and especially committed to meaningful participation from less affluent countries, institutions, and organizations. GAJE is an ALLIANCE of persons committed to achieving JUSTICE through legal education. Clinical education of law students is a key component of justice education, but this organization also works to advance other forms of socially relevant legal education, which includes education of practicing lawyers, judges, non-governmental organizations and the lay public.Footnote 14

The first gathering of GAJE, the next step in the journey that began in Bangalore, was a leap of faith in the power behind the vision of global clinical legal education. A temporary GAJE steering committee, set up by the participants at the various organising meetings and others who joined the email listserv, decided to put on what was billed as the ‘Inaugural Worldwide Conference’ of the not yet officially constituted organisation. In recognition of Dr Menon’s central role in defining the goals and purposes of the organisation and, for me, completing a circle that began when I first started working with him in Delhi, he and I were asked to co-chair the conference. The first decision we made, which contributed greatly to the success of the conference, was to hold it in Dr Menon’s hometown of Thiruvananthapuram in the south Indian state of Kerala. From its conception through its realisation, the inaugural conference demonstrated the power of global clinical legal education and set what became the defining elements of global clinical conferences around the world.Footnote 15

The conference brochure, which identified GAJE as ‘an international organisation dedicated to the promotion of socially relevant legal education’, described the conference as having been ‘designed to bring together persons involved in fundamental transformations of legal education, in conjunction with changes in economic and governmental structures around the world’.Footnote 16 Potential delegates were told that the conference would ‘focus on fostering true international collaboration, on broadening the conception of legal education beyond the academic training of lawyers, and on renewing and maintaining the focus on justice as the central goal of legal education’.Footnote 17 The conference structure included three distinct parts: a one-day workshop before the conference sessions began on ‘Transforming Legal Education into Justice Education’, at which the participants were asked to imagine what a law school with a primary mission to reduce injustice would look like; the formal conference with four days of plenary and breakout sessions; and a two-part ‘Training of Trainers’ (TOT) workshop consisting of a three-day programme presenting a proposed global approach to clinical teaching theory and methods followed by an optional two-day supplemental programme at which participants would develop specific applications of that global approach.Footnote 18

The story of that inaugural conference — the scope of its substantive content, how it was structured, and the boost of energy it gave to a fledgling global clinical movement — can be traced back to Dr Menon’s workshop in Bangalore and the working groups inspired by him in Miami and beyond. It could have been just another step forward, and the global clinical movement has indeed advanced dramatically since then. But the core elements of the inaugural conference and the vision of global clinical legal education that supported it have had a true foundational role in the movement by informing the guiding principles of global clinical legal education at GAJE and beyond. I will describe each of these three core elements of the inaugural conference with illustrations from the conference report.Footnote 19

The substantive content of the conference previewed what are now widely agreed to make up the three key characteristics of clinical courses and clinical programmes around the world. The first goes directly to clinical legal education’s professional educational mission. Clinics around the world focus on two curricular goals aimed at preparing students for practising law, neither of which is emphasised sufficiently in the traditional law school curriculum: providing professional skills training, and instilling professional values of public responsibility and social justice. A second characteristic relates to methodology. At the core of the clinical teaching method is a commitment to experiential learning. Clinical training in professional skills and values takes place while students are in professional roles — real or simulated — and not in a traditional classroom setting where law is taught through one-way lectures or from cases and material presented exclusively in printed texts. Finally, clinical legal education is part of a broader effort at legal education reform aimed at expanding the professional curriculum, implementing innovative teaching methods, and educating lawyers for social justice.Footnote 20

Clinical legal education’s professional educational mission was addressed in a number of sessions on different substantive areas that legal clinics concentrate on. For example, a pair of sessions on community-based justice education and on advancing women’s rights described a range of projects in India, Uganda, and the US, in which community initiatives and women’s rights were advanced. A session on teaching legal skills and social justice using the example of a ‘Street Law’ programme touched on both the educational mission and clinical methodology.Footnote 21 It included descriptions of Street Law programmes in the US and South Africa, as well as discussion of a wide range of substantive issues taken up by students in those programmes including concepts of justice, civil and political rights, housing, employment, social welfare, and consumer law. Practical concerns about the resources necessary to carry out clinical methods were acknowledged in a session titled ‘Law Clinics in Developing Countries: Doing More with Less’. ‘The opportunity to share resources’ was the topic in a session on developing model teaching materials and teaching methods. Despite concerns about the cultural applicability of model material and methods in different countries, it was generally agreed that they could be developed and shared with the decision about use and adaptability left to individual clinicians. On broader legal education reform, a session on gender integration explored the status of women and gender-focused curricular content in 26 participants’ home institutions and the need for a support network on gender issues for teachers and administrators. Another session focused on the institutional value to the law schools of seeing legal clinics as a resource for service delivery, highlighting that in many countries student and faculty time available for clinical and pro bono projects can be a tremendous source of human resources to the local community.

Three components of the structure of the conference bear mention, both to explain the special nature of that first GAJE conference and to demonstrate further the lasting impact it had on future GAJE conferences as well as other clinical legal education conferences around the world. Two have been mentioned already in passing: the use of a combination of plenary and breakout sessions during the middle, more formal part of the conference, and the TOT workshop at the end. The third was described earlier, in slightly different form, as part of the NLSIU training organised by Dr Menon: a site visit to a local lok adalat.

While the use of both plenary and breakout sessions was already the norm with most clinical legal education conferences, the allocation of time between those two types of sessions signalled the emphasis that would be placed on interaction among the delegates and the importance of each delegate’s active participation to the work of the conference. Each day was divided into a morning and afternoon session, with short plenary sessions on a given theme followed by small-group breakouts on identified topics within the general session theme. (In keeping with local tradition, there were longer formal opening and closing plenary sessions that were distinct from the substantive working sessions that made up the bulk of the conference days.) For example, in the plenary discussion on integrating gender into justice education where the need for a support network on gender issues for teachers and administrators was discussed, a breakout group carried that concern forward by engaging in a brainstorming session designed to support women’s full participation in GAJE governance. Breakouts in a session on international collaboration in promoting justice education had participants describe how they saw themselves working towards collaborative efforts for justice education in their countries and institutions; projects described included collaboration between the Law and Advocacy Project for Women in Ghana and Georgetown University Law School in the US and a Soros-funded project bringing Street Law and the use of interactive methods of teaching to 18 Eastern European countries. The lok adalat visit allowed international delegates to observe a local concept of legal services delivery in its actual setting, thereby profiting from the conference taking place in another part of the world, and allowed all to reflect on the opportunities for student participation in related clinical projects. The TOT workshop, while integrated into the full conference, was an optional separate event. About half of the delegates stayed for the workshop, representing a wide range of countries and regions. As noted earlier, it consisted of a three-day programme focused around a proposed global approach to clinical teaching theory and methods followed by an optional two-day supplemental programme at which participants would develop specific applications of that global approach. The workshop sessions during the first part focused on training students in a justice context, with demonstrations and exercises aimed at identifying effective teaching and learning strategies applicable generally to clinical programmes around the world. The second part turned fully practical, during which the participants worked in small groups to produce specific training models and then presented them to the full group of participants for comment and suggestions. The workshop concluded with a general discussion focusing on possible obstacles to implementing the models and strategies for addressing them.

The third core element of the conference — providing energy to advance a global clinical movement — was separate from its substantive content and structure yet central to the sustainability of global clinical legal education. At a social level, the conference left much room for what can be described loosely as ‘networking’. Coffee/tea breaks were programmed each morning and afternoon just outside meeting rooms and a buffet lunch was provided each day to facilitate informal interactions among delegates while the conference sessions were fresh in mind. There were opening and closing dinners for both the substantive sessions part of the conference and the TOT workshop that facilitated delegates with shared interests to connect in a casual setting. The local organisers even arranged for delegates to visit the homes of local law students whose parents volunteered to receive us. On a more professional level, delegates were encouraged, especially during the breakout sessions, to seek out potential cross-national and cross-regional collaborative projects. One direct result from that was the publication a few years later of a book on child advocacy first conceived of during the conference, edited by and with all contributions by conference delegates.Footnote 22 There were also some informal gatherings in the evenings, including an open forum on human rights organised by the dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Kerala. Delegates from Europe, Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and the Americas described the human rights position in their country with particular attention on child labour, capital punishment, torture, and due process.

Finally, and most directly related to the conference’s advancement of a global clinical movement, was the last day of conference sessions before the start of the TOT workshop, which was devoted to charting a future for GAJE under the title ‘Where Do We Go from Here?’ The main topics of the session were drawn from ideas that had been circulated informally during the conference, some of which were in response to a notice that was placed at the conference hotel asking delegates what they wanted to flow from the event. Included were issues around the establishment of a Steering Committee (for example: gender and regional balance, election/selection process, size); organisational structure (for example: drafting a constitution, membership criteria); and planning future activities (most importantly, a second conference). The idea of identifying formal regions for both GAJE’s organisational structure and for supporting regional activities was one major topic of discussion, with some delegates expressing concern about overemphasising regional interests in a Steering Committee that could be balanced by including some at-large members as well. The two most consequential decisions taken were the appointment of a new Temporary Steering Committee that would continue to operate without a permanent structure and the creation of a Constitution Committee charged with proposing such a structure. A few additional committees were established as well, including a committee to begin planning a second worldwide conference and others to address matters such as membership and communications. A sense of the quality and depth of the discussion emerges from the wide range of topics raised during the session, including: Does justice education mean (or require) institutional change? What is GAJE’s responsibility to the ‘next generation’ of law students, young practitioners, and activists? How can those interested in justice education other than law teachers be included? How can all ‘stakeholders’ in justice education get access to information about and through GAJE? How can GAJE help advocate for clinical legal education worldwide, and for seeing that such advocacy includes sustainability? How to support efforts to allow students in more countries to ‘practise’ through clinical education rather than serve in a ‘paralegal’-type capacity?

The inaugural conference drew 125 delegates from 20 countries, representing every major region of the world. It was a remarkable gathering of internationally diverse clinical law teachers brought together in a small city in south India through what was essentially word-of-mouth publicity. But in a way no more remarkable than the teacher training workshop Dr Menon had put together in Bangalore four years earlier with 10 international faculty and some 25 South Asian participants. Or the meetings in Miami and Sydney a year after that, at which a growing core of international clinicians, all tied in one way or another to Dr Menon, set in motion a process for highlighting global clinical legal education and the institutionalisation of a global clinical movement. As anticipated in Thiruvananthapuram, GAJE was officially created at its second worldwide conference, held in Durban, South Africa, in 2001.Footnote 23 Following the model of the inaugural conference, the Durban conference included a pre-conference workshop, a formal conference with plenary and breakout sessions, and a post-conference TOT workshop. A formal constitution was adopted at a General Meeting, which set out the following purposes and goals of the organisation:

The purpose of GAJE is to promote justice through education by bringing together persons from many countries and every inhabited continent in the world, who exchange perspectives and work collaboratively from a variety of legal, educational and organizational settings. Justice education addresses all forms of social, economic, political and human rights and includes not only education of law students but also education of practicing lawyers, judges, non-governmental organizations and the lay public.


The goals of GAJE include the following:

  1. 1.

    To facilitate international information sharing and collaboration on justice education.

  2. 2.

    To support, develop, and implement advocacy projects on a regional and global basis.

  3. 3.

    To convene global conferences, workshops and training sessions on justice education at locations accessible and affordable for persons from developing countries.

  4. 4.

    To receive and administer funds to support the development of innovative justice education, especially in developing countries.

  5. 5.

    To serve as a clearinghouse of teaching methods and materials.Footnote 24

By now, GAJE has held ten worldwide conferences in nine countries around the world (the seventh conference was also held in India), drawing upwards of 300 delegates from 50 or more countries representing each region of the world. The tenth conference, held in Bandung, Indonesia, in 2019, celebrated GAJE’s 20th anniversary. The opening plenary session celebrated the life of Dr Menon, who had passed away earlier that year, and honoured his foundational contributions not just to GAJE but also to global clinical legal education worldwide. The organisation also named its first award the NR Madhava Menon Award, given to acknowledge a GAJE member’s commitment to GAJE’s core mission of achieving justice through legal education and advancing various forms of socially relevant legal education.

While even a brief description of each of the nine subsequent conferences in relation to the inaugural conference is not possible here,Footnote 25 they all carried forward the core common elements of the inaugural conference: content focused on the social justice mission of global clinical legal education; a conference structure that relies on concurrent and breakout sessions over plenary sessions, and includes local site visits and sessions dedicated to training of trainers (sometimes incorporated into the general conference programme, sometimes as post-conference TOT workshops); and significant amounts of time set aside for networking and advancing the institutional goals of GAJE and the global clinical movement. Together they represent guiding principles Dr Menon’s vision of global clinical legal education left to GAJE — not just for its conferences but also to shape its educational and social justice mission. Dr Menon set a path for a global clinical movement that ran from Bangalore to Thiruvananthapuram, via Miami and Sydney. His light remains bright today, as Dr Menon takes his rightful place, not just as the ‘father of modern legal education in India’, but also as the guiding light of global clinical legal education.