The Legal Education Reform program aims to foster new generations of more effective and socially oriented lawyers by making legal education more practice oriented, with an emphasis on clinical legal education. The promotion of legal education reform is one of the cornerstones of PILI's contributions to the development of a public interest law infrastructure in Europe and Asia. Without a socially responsive legal profession, the expansion of rights that has occurred in many of these countries is of limited value. 

PILI’s primary activity in the area of legal education reform is the support and development of university-based legal clinics. The clinical legal education component offers on-site technical assistance and capacity-building workshops that provide law school faculties with the organizational base, skill sets, and instructional resources needed to provide a sustainable foundation for practice-oriented learning.

Past PILI projects in this field have included cooperating in the creation of the Clinical Legal Education Foundation in Russia, which seeks to support the development of legal clinics in Russia from a public interest perspective. In Serbia, Poland, and Romania, PILI’s activities have focused on providing assistance to law faculties in establishing specialized legal clinics in areas such as environmental law and children’s rights. In addition, a major current PILI initiative under this program aims to support legal education reform in the former Soviet Union. Throughout the project, PILI will work with faculty and administrators at key legal education institutions in Armenia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova and Ukraine to advance innovative teaching methods, comprehensive curriculum development, and excellence in teaching. For more information about this project, click here.