LEGAL CLINIC

Overall, the Clinical Legal Education course seeks to promote commitment amongst law students to public interest lawyering, including the promotion of social justice through legal education. Specifically, the CLE course seeks to provide students with practical legal skills of legal representation, litigation, advocacy, legal research, fact-finding in the field, and legal drafting, by taking on real-live public interest law cases and projects. In particular, CLE will focus on the area of Civil and Political rights, social and economic rights protection, and may expand to other thematic areas of human rights.

CLE will enable students to develop the skills and expertise of professional lawyers, and second, will provide critical legal services free of charge to benefit the public interest. CLE will seek to equip students with practical legal skills to become competent and effective advocates as well as competitive members in the professional legal field. At the same time, by involving student lawyers in public interest law cases and projects, the course also aims to educate students on meeting their civic duties in our society.
The course has two components: (1) CLE class; and, (2) public interest law internship. The components will be complementary to each other, each aiming to build the student’s practical legal, advocacy and professional skills by assigning students to work on live public interest law cases and projects, with the supervision of a trained legal professionals. Both components will qualify for academic credit. 
The public interest law internship is designed to qualify for under the University  of  Kigali field attachment’ programme/policy. Students selected for the CLE course will be placed with partner institutions to conduct their field attachment during the whole academic year, so as to further build on the litigation and advocacy skills acquired during the CLE course.