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Copyright (c) 2007 Clinical Law Review, Inc.
Clinical Law Review

Spring, 2007

13 Clinical L. Rev. 779

LENGTH: 11602 words

PAPERS PRESENTED AT THE UCLA/IALS CONFERENCE ON "ENRICHING CLINICAL EDUCATION": A "SYSTEMS" APPROACH TO CLINICAL LEGAL EDUCATION

NAME: Meredith J. Ross*

BIO: * Clinical Professor of Law, University of Wisconsin Law School, and Director of the Frank J. Remington Center. This article is a much-modified version of a paper that I presented at the Sixth International Conference on Clinical Legal Education at Lake Arrowhead, California, in October of 2005. I would like to thank all who commented on that presentation. I would also like to thank members of the University of Wisconsin Law School's faculty and staff who commented on a works-in-progress talk that I presented at the Law School's "Big Ideas Cafe" in August of 2006. I would especially like to thank Walter Dickey for his very thoughtful contributions to this article. Most of all, I would like to thank the faculty, staff, students, and clients of the Remington Center, who make it a pleasure to go to work every day.

 LEXISNEXIS SUMMARY:
 ...  This article describes the history and development of the "systems" approach to clinical legal education at the University of Wisconsin's Frank J. Remington Center. ...  The "systems" approach to clinical legal education perceives and resolves the historic tension between the skills acquisition and social justice missions of law school clinics in unique ways, and has directed the Remington Center's path from a client population based clinic serving prison inmates to a collection of subject-matter based clinics that both provide service to clients and work on broader systemic improvement and reform. ...  As Kim O'Leary has noted, law school clinics "developed historically as part of an explicit social justice agenda" and many clinicians continue to defend this as a legitimate goal of clinical legal education. ...  In the summer of 1964, the first full-time summer interns were enrolled in the Law Student Correctional Internship Program at the University of Wisconsin Law School. ... These diagnostic interviews, then, provided an excellent opportunity for law students to learn, from each inmate client's perspective, the daunting complexities of the criminal justice system and the other systems - family, mental health, immigration and social services - with which it intersects. ...  

HIGHLIGHT:  This article describes the history and development of the "systems" approach to clinical legal education at the University of Wisconsin's Frank J. Remington Center. Begun as a correctional summer internship in 1964, the Remington Center has focused on providing law students with an observation-based understanding of the ground-level workings of the criminal justice system. This focus on the study of systems has grown out of founder Frank Remington's work in the groundbreaking American Bar Foundation Study of the criminal justice system in the 1950s and 1960s, the intellectual "law in action" traditions at the University of Wisconsin Law School, and the larger "Wisconsin Idea" that research at the university should serve state policy. The "systems" approach to clinical legal education perceives and resolves the historic tension between the skills acquisition and social justice missions of law school clinics in unique ways, and has directed the Remington Center's path from a client population based clinic serving prison inmates to a collection of subject-matter based clinics that both provide service to clients and work on broader systemic improvement and reform.

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I. Introduction
 
 The history of clinical legal education in this country is one of debates-over its goals, its methods, and its case or client selection. n1 One of the most fundamental of these debates concerns whether the goal of a law school clinic should be "skills acquisition" or "social justice." On one side of this debate stand the proponents of skills acquisition.  [*780]  They believe that the most important goal of clinical education is to encourage law students to develop the skills and values necessary to become competent, ethical, reflective practitioners. n2 To that end, their teaching methods generally encourage students to take the primary responsibility for resolving clients' concerns, by ensuring that cases involve fairly discrete and manageable tasks for individual clients. Course work accompanying the live-client experience is typically organized by tasks, including interviewing, developing a theory of the case, investigation, counseling, negotiating, and preparing for litigation. n3 Although this form of education is not value-neutral, the value emphasized tends to be "client-centered representation" in the context of an individual attorney-client relationship. n4
On the other side of this debate stand the proponents of social justice. As Kim O'Leary has noted, law school clinics "developed historically as part of an explicit social justice agenda" and many clinicians continue to defend this as a legitimate goal of clinical legal education. n5 Under this view, a primary purpose of law school clinics  [*781]  is to provide a "practical vision of law as an instrument of social justice." n6 These clinics may focus on complex impact cases, often involving hand-picked or class action clients, in order to develop "novel theories to expand the frontiers of freedom and equality." n7
In this Article, I will discuss a unique approach to integrating skills acquisition and social justice in clinical legal education that has developed within the intellectual culture of the University of Wisconsin Law School. For the past forty years, the University of Wisconsin Law School's Frank J. Remington Center has taken a "systems approach" to clinical legal education. By "systems approach," I mean an emphasis on teaching law students how particular systems-such as the criminal justice system, the mental health system, or the juvenile justice system-work at a day-to-day operational level. This approach encompasses both skills acquisition and social justice goals. But the skills include not only the staples of the attorney-client relationship such as interviewing and counseling, but also a broader understanding of the complex interrelationships involved in how systems work. And the social justice goals include not only assistance to individual clients, but also improvement of the legal and social service systems in which they are enmeshed.
Obviously, the above portrait of the debate between skills acquisition and social justice is both exaggerated and oversimplified. Although clinicians over the years have staked out strong positions in the debate, most agree that teaching both lawyering skills and social justice are important missions of clinical legal education, and have sought to integrate aspects of each into their clinic design. And, certainly, even those clinicians who agree that social justice should be a primary goal of a law school clinic may disagree on what "social justice" means, or on the best way to structure clinics to teach the social  [*782]  justice mission. Some would argue that social justice is best achieved in the representation of individual clients, while others would focus on big cases. n8 "Social justice" could also mean focusing on particular causes, rather than the legal concerns articulated by clients. n9 Indeed, some would argue that lawyers, and lawyers-in-training, should not necessarily focus on legal remedies at all. n10
Nevertheless, resolution of the fundamental question of how to balance the various purposes of law school clinics is important because it informs ancillary debates about clinical structure and teaching methodology. Clinics focused on skills acquisition may tend to be structured around individual clients who present small, discrete, issues. In this way, the student can take "ownership" of the case and develop a strong attorney-client relationship. n11 In contrast, clinics focused on social justice may emphasize larger, constitutional or class action cases. n12 Discussion of how to balance the purposes of clinical education also informs the debate between those who believe that a clinic should be organized around a client population and those who  [*783]  believe it should be organized around specific areas of law. n13 On the one hand, focusing a clinic on a specialized subject matter may require the clinical supervisor to be well versed in the law. n14 On the other hand, a population-based clinic may better allow the student to focus on all of a community's social justice needs, rather than solely on specific legal issues. n15 And, as David Chavkin argues, subject-matter clinics may frustrate the goal of client-centeredness because they "stamp on the client's forehead the words 'disability law case' or 'civil rights law case' or 'family law case.'" n16
This Article will trace the historical development of the Remington Center's "systems approach" to clinical legal education and will show how that approach has informed the Remington Center's resolution of some of these ancillary choices relating to clinic design and teaching methodology. Part II of this Article describes the historical development of the Remington Center's "systems approach." Although it was part of what has been called the "second wave" of clinical legal education funded through CLEPR in the 1960s and 1970s, the Remington Center was remarkably isolated from the pedagogical influences of the nationwide clinical legal education movement. It was instead an outgrowth of Professor Frank Remington's  [*784]  pioneering research into the criminal justice system as part of a decade-long American Bar Foundation study. It was influenced as well by the intellectual traditions of the University of Wisconsin Law School. Part III explores how the "systems approach" continues to inform the Remington Center's resolution of some of the pedagogical challenges facing clinical legal education today.
II. Historical Development of the Remington Center's "Systems Approach"
 
 The Remington Center is an umbrella organization, currently comprised of eight in-house clinical projects and two externship projects. Reflecting the Center's original emphasis on criminal justice and corrections, four of its in-house clinical projects focus on the needs of persons incarcerated in state and federal prisons throughout Wisconsin: the Legal Assistance to Institutionalized Persons Project (LAIP), the Oxford Federal Project, the Family Law-Restorative Justice Project, and the Wisconsin Innocence Project. Together, these four projects enroll approximately 50 students each year. n17
The genesis of the Remington Center prison-based clinics in the 1960s was quite unlike that of most clinics nationwide. Although, like most law schools, Wisconsin received CLEPR funding in its early days, the program that eventually evolved into the Remington Center n18 never followed the CLEPR model of large-volume assistance  [*785]  to the poor; nor did it ever adopt the skills acquisition approach demonstrated in Gary Bellow and Bea Moulton's early clinical textbook, The Lawyering Process. n19 Rather, the clinical legal education program at the Remington Center embodies the vision and values of Frank J. Remington, a member of Wisconsin's criminal law faculty from 1949 until his death in 1994. It was also influenced by the unique intellectual and scholarly traditions of the University of Wisconsin Law School.
A. Professor Remington and the American Bar Foundation
 Study of the Criminal Justice System
 
 Prof. Remington was profoundly influenced by his role as director, during the 1950s and early 1960s, of a ten-year empirical study of criminal justice system. This study, funded by the American Bar Foundation (ABF), was published in five groundbreaking volumes beginning in 1965. n20 The ABF Survey was originally proposed in 1953 by Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, "who considered American law enforcement ineffective and in a state of breakdown." n21 Originally, the ABF survey was designed with a traditional methodology of studying "the organizational structure, administrative processes, and agency records of criminal justice agencies to learn the  [*786]  extent to which agencies adhered to prescribed standards." n22 Fortunately, as a direct consequence of the leadership of Prof. Remington and Lloyd Ohlin, the survey "went in a fundamentally different direction ... . much less concerned with official summary statistics and more concerned with the analysis of the criminal justice system in daily operation." n23 Researchers were dispatched to jurisdictions in three states-Kansas, Michigan, and Wisconsin. In order to observe actual behavior and decisions within the criminal justice system, the researchers:

 rode with police officers in squad cars around-the-clock, went on raids, observed investigations and arrests. They sat at the elbows of prosecutors as they made decisions. They observed cases from initial appearance before a magistrate through sentencing in the courts. They went with parole officers on home visits and talked to parolees and probationers. n24

 The researchers produced voluminous "field reports," which were eventually incorporated into over a dozen working papers and the published volumes. n25
The major findings of the ABF Survey - gained from describing the day-to-day operations of the criminal justice system, from investigation through sentencing - may now seem obvious. At the time, however, they were innovative, and even shocking, to a generation of lawyers and legal academics trained in black letter law and Langdell's case method system. First, the ABF study observed that the criminal law is used not only to address serious crime, but also social problems, such as mental illness or substance abuse. Second, they learned that low-visibility, day-to-day discretionary decisionmaking pervades the criminal justice system, from the decision of the police officer on the beat whether or not to arrest an individual who is violating the letter of the law; to the prosecutor's decision whether (and what) to charge in a given case; to the judge's decision on how to sentence a convicted defendant; to the parole commission's decision whether or not to release an incarcerated offender. Third, they pointed out that the criminal justice system is complex and interrelated, with decisions by an actor at any point affecting actors at other points. And finally, they argued that the most productive legal research is empirical, rather than doctrinal; rather than studying only the formal organization of  [*787]  the criminal justice system, scholars need to look at how the law actually operates within the system. n26
Based on his work with the ABF study, Prof. Remington concluded that law graduates, while they had sufficient technical legal skills, had an insufficient understanding of the complexities of the criminal justice system. n27 As a result, these graduates were failing in their obligations to clients, and failing to use their legal training to address deficiencies in the system. As Professor Remington's colleague Frank Miller noted in 1959, "it is highly desirable that lawyers be technically competent advisors in formal legal matters. But... lawyers ought to be more than that... . We can and must fit the lawyer for the task of general political and social advisor to the community." n28 Accordingly, in the early 1960s, Prof. Remington determined that a new type of legal education was necessary to better prepare law school graduates for the complexities of the real-world criminal justice system.
Prof. Remington's early writings consistently articulated certain bedrock assumptions about legal education in general and experiential legal education in particular. First, he believed that the legal profession did not make an adequate contribution to the administration of criminal justice. He was particularly concerned about the lack of adequate client representation at all stages, the insufficient number of lawyers working in criminal justice agencies, and the failure of leadership at the community and legislative levels. n29 Second, he believed that the most likely site for successful reform lay in the law school, although he felt that existing methods of legal education were not up to the challenge. Specifically, he believed that "the nature and complexity of the [criminal justice] system could not adequately be explicated in the classroom alone ... only through firsthand experience [could] the young lawyer hope to develop adequate professional capacity to make a contribution." n30 Third, he did not believe that the goal of a law school clinic was "skills acquisition." Indeed, according to his biographer, Prof. Remington was "mildly contemptuous" of the  [*788]  idea of focusing clinical education on skills training:

 The need was not for "on-the-job" training for positions the lawyer might later hold. Such training would narrow the experience to a head start program. The need was rather to broaden the lawyer's orientation by providing an experience in areas with which the lawyer would not necessarily be concerned in the course of a professional career. That experience, initially, was to be in correctional settings. n31

 Rather, Prof. Remington believed that an experiential program should function much more holistically as a "learning center" that would expose students to the complexities of how the law was actually administered in the real world. n32
Prof. Remington's approach, then, was to educate law students about the real workings of the criminal justice system, so that they would, in turn, use their knowledge to improve the fairness and effectiveness of the system on behalf not only of defendants, but also on behalf of police offices, judges, social workers, attorneys, and correctional officials. He believed that an understanding of the relationship between "law, lawyers and the overall processes of enforcing the criminal law" was essential "if lawyers are to furnish effective reorientation to suspects ... if the law through trial judges is realistically and effectively to control police practices; and, perhaps most important, if lawyers are to have constructive impact on the development of a more  [*789]  adequate community appreciation of the importance and complexity of the law enforcement task." n33
B. The Early Correctional Internship: Clinic Students as
 Observers of the System
 
 In the summer of 1964, the first full-time summer interns were enrolled in the Law Student Correctional Internship Program at the University of Wisconsin Law School. Consistent with the findings of the ABF Survey, the program's stated goals were to inform aspiring lawyers about the human consequences of confinement; to better understand the role and responsibility of the lawyer as a problem-solver to understand the ways in which the criminal justice and mental health systems actually operated; and to develop good judgment. n34
In its earliest stages, Wisconsin's correctional internship program was not a "clinic" in which law students assisted clients under supervision. Rather, the earliest placements put law students in the role of observers, learning about the day-to-day complexities of the criminal justice system. Interns spent summers riding in police cars, chauffeuring members of the Wisconsin Parole Commission to hearings at the prisons, and assisting recreational staff and social workers at maximum-security prisons. Their role, in both the experiential and seminar components of the internship, was to observe, describe, and analyze how the correctional portion of the criminal justice system operated.
The seminar papers of the 1964 and 1965 classes reflected this focus. Topics included the confidentiality of presentence investigation reports; the civil and criminal legal problems of incarcerated offenders; the role of the lawyer in correctional services; the relationship between Wisconsin's adult and juvenile justice systems; Wisconsin's parole system; a case study of revocation; a description of the legal concerns of probationers and parolees; and a nuts-and-bolts description of the records and social services office at a Wisconsin prison.
Typical of the "observational" and "systems" approach of these  [*790]  early essays was a two-part memorandum addressed to the Division of Corrections (now the Wisconsin Department of Corrections, or DOC). The memorandum was written by a student who had spent several months interning at the DOC's central administrative office, visiting prisons, and accompanying the parole commission. The student began by noting that she was "in the position of an outsider observing the system broadly from a legal point of view." n35 Focusing on "conditions of confinement" lawsuits brought by inmates against the DOC, the student observed that "the general attitude in the Madison office [of the DOC] ... was one of preserving the status quo, going slow and changing only when forced to change-i.e. by court order." n36 She suggested that a better approach would be for the DOC to "examine their own system so that they may: 1.) change it to meet (and I would hope to exceed) constitutional and legal standards, or 2.) put up a valid and humane defense to the nuisance or factually unfounded suits." n37 The student went on to summarize the kinds of complaints raised by DOC inmates, including censorship and first amendment issues; medical, dietary, and psychiatric complaints; internal prison discipline; and probation, parole, and good time. n38 The student suggested that, with regard to each kind of issue, the DOC should develop and rely upon "standard guidelines which are written and adhered to by all the institutions," n39 and went on to suggest generally what these guidelines might say. n40
The early relationship between the Remington Center and the Wisconsin DOC provides a good illustration of Prof. Remington's approach to both legal education and social justice. His goal was to improve the criminal justice system. To do that, he believed, it was necessary to educate lawyers and non-lawyers working within the system about the complexities and interrelationships of decisionmaking; develop procedures that at a day-to-day level, improved the quality of decisions; and convince actors within the system that informed decisions, based upon accurate information, would result in better outcomes.  [*791]  In short, Prof. Remington's approach was collaborative, bottom-up, and incremental, rather than adversarial and top-down. It relied less on constitutional mandates to criminal justice actors than on convincing the cop on the street, or the prosecutor making charging decisions, or the parole commissioner making release decisions, that changing their day-to-day practices would improve fairness and efficacy in the long run. This approach was more conservative and incremental, and arguably more pragmatic and effective, the than the impact litigation beginning to develop at other law school clinics.
C. The Intellectual Traditions of the University of Wisconsin Law School
 
 Prof. Remington's approach in the early 1960s, while highly innovative in the context of traditional legal education and even in the context of other early clinical programs, nevertheless fit squarely within the University of Wisconsin Law School's own traditions. In particular, Prof. Remington's ideas fit well within two themes that have long defined the University of Wisconsin Law School: its "law-in-action" approach to scholarship and legal education, and its commitment to service, best known as the "Wisconsin Idea."
Law-in-action is an outgrowth of the Legal Realism of the 1930s and '40s. One of the most prominent of the Legal Realists, Jerome Frank, attacked Langdell's "case method" as deforming legal education, arguing that the study of appellate opinions "hopelessly oversimplified" the real world of law that students needed to learn. n41 In contrast to Langdell's emphasis on published appellate cases, Frank believed that law students needed to observe the observations of actual trial and appellate courts, particularly by giving students the opportunity to work in law school clinics. n42
In the 1950s and '60s, Wisconsin's law-in-action approach took Legal Realism a step further: not only should legal scholarship go beyond the doctrinal emphasis of earlier legal scholars, but it should also go beyond Legal Realism's emphasis on trial and appellate court processes, to study law as it actually operated in administrative agencies, board room decisionmaking, business relationships, and police practices. n43 The law-in-action approach encouraged scholars to study  [*792]  the "gaps between what we teach in law schools and what goes on in the world," n44 and exhibited a healthy skepticism about both the efficacy and the desirability of the "law on the books." n45
Professor Willard Hurst, who "remade legal history into a true empirical enterprise" by "looking at the law from the bottom up," was a colleague and mentor of Frank Remington's, and certainly influenced the empirical approach adopted by Prof. Remington in the ABF Study. n46 Prof. Remington's law-in-action approach, in turn, influenced a whole generation of scholars at Wisconsin, including Stewart Macaulay, who noted in a recent article,

 My late colleague Frank Remington was a master of doctrinal criminal law-he was, after all, the primary drafter of the Wisconsin Criminal Code. However, Remington always insisted that if you wanted to understand criminal law, you had to ride in the front seat of a squad car on an inner city on a hot summer night. n47

 As noted earlier, n48 the insights that Prof. Remington learned from the ABF study influenced not only his legal scholarship, but also his understanding of the kind of education that aspiring lawyers needed to receive in order to become outstanding practitioners. In this, he was not alone. Other members of Wisconsin's law faculty were also changing the content of their courses to emphasize the complex interactions among "law, the environment in which it works, and the ideas that people have about it," n49 and to "represent[] the dominant ideas of law as process ... and as function." n50 But it is fair to say that Prof. Remington, more than any of his colleagues, recognized that a new approach to legal education and legal scholarship required new, experiential method of teaching.
Prof. Remington's creation of the correctional internship program  [*793]  also fit squarely within Wisconsin's second longstanding tradition, the century-old "Wisconsin Idea," best known by the phrase "the boundaries of the University are the boundaries of the state." n51 The Wisconsin Idea "consists of two distinct and separate ideas. One is that the University ought to serve the whole state, to be helpful to the people of the entire state, to all sorts of conditions of men and women, as well as to the [students] sent there to be trained and fitted for service. The other correlative idea is that the service should be direct, vital, and practical as far as possible, [as by] sending students to study government 'in operation,' to learn not [only] from the books, but from actual processes and concrete examples." n52
The Wisconsin Idea has been influential throughout the University of Wisconsin Law School's history, whose faculty members have advised the legislature, drafted statutes, and assisted state agencies. It was not, therefore, a big step for Prof. Remington to propose a law school course in which students would work collaboratively with correctional agencies in order to help the agencies improve their processes and decisionmaking.
D. Evolution from Student Observation into a Legal Assistance Program
 
 Prof. Remington's collaborative and "systems" approach directly affected the educational experiences of the Remington Center's early clinical students. Throughout the 1960s, Prof. Remington continued to place students in positions in which they could observe and analyze the decisionmaking of individuals and agencies involved in the criminal justice system, particularly the correctional system. Within a few years, however, inmates and prison social workers began to ask for advice about legal problems from the law students in their midst. n53 What had begun as a law student system observation program began to evolve into a legal assistance program in which students took on direct representation of inmates.
In 1969, Prof. Remington proposed to the DOC that law students, working under law faculty supervision, could respond to inmate requests  [*794]  for help with postconviction remedies. n54 In addition to providing an opportunity for students to learn about postconviction law and procedure, Prof. Remington's goal was to improve the quality of postconviction litigation by helping inmates to have a fair opportunity to present their claims, resulting in better court decisions. n55 Eventually, this proposal was formalized into an agreement with the Wisconsin DOC, under which the DOC would pay the internship program an annual amount for the legal services that the students provided to inmates. By the mid-1970s, the program had a similar agreement with the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), for services provided to inmates at the Federal Correctional Institution and prison camp in Oxford, Wisconsin.
Over time, the range of issues addressed by students increased. "Postconviction issues" expanded beyond motions for a new trial, plea withdrawal, or resentencing, to include issues such as sentence credit (credit for time spent in custody prior to sentencing); sentence modification, and resolution of pending fines or charges. Family law concerns also came to the fore, including divorce, visitation, child support, and paternity issues. Students also assisted inmates with issues such as debts, tax problems, wills, and immigration concerns. And, beginning in the 1980s, service expanded to include victim-offender conferencing. n56
The Wisconsin DOC's willingness to pay for legal services to inmates in its custody may seem surprising. But it makes sense when viewed from Prof. Remington's systems perspective, which focused on helping all actors in the criminal justice system - the police, attorneys, judges, corrections officials - to improve the system. Prof. Remington began with the idea that the educational goal of the program was to help students understand how systems operate, rather than changing the law to comport with his idea of social justice. As a result, his legal assistance program looked different than one originating from either a purely law reform (social justice) or a purely client service perspective, and allowed it to develop a collaborative, rather than adversarial, relationship with corrections.
Initially, the DOC was motivated, at least in part, by the United States Supreme Court's 1969 ruling in Johnson v. Avery n57 that correctional  [*795]  systems could not prevent inmates from helping one another with legal advice unless there were other adequate forms of legal assistance available. DOC officials believed that law student assistance to inmates would allow them to better regulate the activities of jailhouse lawyers, some of whom they believed to be preying on less-capable inmates.
Over time, however, Prof. Remington and Professor Walter Dickey, who succeeded him as Director of the Remington Center, convinced the DOC and the Federal BOP that legal assistance to inmates was in the agencies' own best interest, contributing to the improvement of the correctional system as a whole. The agencies began to understand that inmates who were frustrated by unresolved legal were more likely to act out, posing a security risk within the institution. They realized that effective postconviction review could result in a fairer and more accurate outcome in a given case. n58 And they recognized that inmates whose legal problems-including pending charges, unpaid child support, and visitation disputes - were resolved while they were incarcerated could leave the institution "at peace" with the legal universe, lessening their likelihood of recidivism. n59
The Remington Center's cooperative relationship with corrections both limited and expanded the students' clinical experiences and the program's social justice mission. On the one hand, the agreements with the DOC and BOP precluded the clinical program from representing inmates in "conditions of confinement" litigation against corrections, a significant limitation on the kinds of services provided. n60  [*796]  On the other hand, as a result of this collaboration, clinical students obtained unprecedented access to inmates and their records. Students could meet with inmates at all institutions as often as they needed; with the inmates' permission, they had full access to inmates' prison records; and they could contact prison officials if they had questions or concerns about how institution policies affected particular inmates. They were thus able to assist a large number of individual inmates, which would have been impossible without the cooperation of the correctional agencies involved. n61 Perhaps most importantly, students and clinical faculty were able to observe the correctional system in depth; analyze problems; and suggest improvements that the officials could respond to in a non-defensive, non-adversarial manner.
The collaborative relationship also provided financial stability to the program, once grant funding ceased in the early 1970s. Since the mid-1970s, the Remington Center has entered into a series of annual contracts with the Wisconsin DOC and the Federal BOP, which pay the Center to provide student services to the inmates in their custody. n62 In addition, at Prof. Remington's request, the University successfully lobbied the Wisconsin legislature in 1975 to add funding to the Law School's base budget dedicated to the clinical program. Together, the contract income and legislative appropriation pay for over half the Remington Center's operating costs, significantly easing the program's burden on the Law School's budget.
In one other important way, the correctional internship program at Wisconsin was unique. From its inception, and through all of its many changes, the program has emphasized a full-time immersion experience for law students. Professor Remington believed that students needed an immersion experience in order to adequately begin to develop a richly textured and nuanced understanding of the criminal justice system. Thus, unlike programs at virtually all other law schools in the country, the Remington Center's clinical projects have  [*797]  always included a full-time (40 hours a week), three-month summer component. So that students could afford to spend a summer in the clinic rather than working for law firms, the summer program has always included a stipend in addition to course credit. The students continue working in the clinic part-time into the fall and spring semesters; but the full-time summer immersion program is the core of their educational experience.
From the beginning, then, the Remington Center was outside of the mainstream exemplified by its contemporaries at other law school clinics. n63 Early articles about Wisconsin's program focused not on clinical pedagogy, but on substantive legal issues raised by the legal concerns of its inmate clients. n64 However, these articles never lost sight of Prof. Remington's educational goals: developing professional responsibility and judgment in law students, and introducing them to the complexity of the criminal justice system. n65
Although the education of law students was the Remington Center primary goal, it was never the Center's only goal. Service and research - again, broadly defined - were also important. Prof. Remington believed that by assisting prison inmates, students would gain significant insights into the actual operations of the criminal justice system while helping some of the most underserved citizens in the state. At the same time, the program's students and faculty had a unique opportunity to learn perspectives about the justice system available to very few people. In turn, they had a responsibility to disseminate this information to a wider audience - by publishing articles in law reviews and bar journals, writing policy papers and initiatives, helping to draft statutes and administrative rules, or working with agencies to improve the efficacy and fairness of their operations. n66 As Prof. Dickey noted in a 1990 memo to Wisconsin's law faculty,

 What I am sure about is that we cannot be satisfied with a program which merely provides routine legal services. A program with no  [*798]  more than a service dimension ... has no place in a university... . service should serve as a vehicle to achieve other objectives: education of law students, research and writing and improvement in the justice system. n67

 Many of the Remington Center's graduates, who include prosecutors and defense attorneys, judges, parole commissioners, correctional officials, legislators, and community leaders, have been profoundly influenced by the Center's emphasis on understanding the human as well as legal aspects of the criminal justice system. As one graduate, now a county prosecutor, wrote, "Short of 'doing time,' I can not imagine how one could get a better perspective on the human consequences of confinement. The experience has been something I draw upon fairly frequently, and sometimes subconsciously, ... as a prosecutor." n68
III. The Remington Center's "Systems Approach" Today
 
 Over the years, the Remington Center grew and changed, while still maintaining its original focus on improving the justice "system," statewide and nationwide. From eight correctional internships in 1964, the program grew to 24 in 1974, 40 in 1980, and 50 in 1989. Since 1990, the Center has maintained 50 student internships in the correctional arena. n69 Nevertheless, the Center has remained true to Frank Remington's original vision. n70 Despite this consistency, the  [*799]  Remington Center has evolved over the years in response to changes in the law and pedagogical concerns. n71 In particular, while maintaining its "systems" focus, the structure of the Center's clinical program has changed significantly over the years.
Until the late 1990s, the correctional internship program was organized around a single client population - prison inmates. Fairly early in its history, the correctional internship program had evolved into the Legal Assistance to Institutionalized Persons Project (LAIP), a clinical program in which up to 50 students each year provided general legal services, both civil and criminal, to state and federal prison inmates throughout Wisconsin. The heart of the relationship between the LAIP student and the inmate client was the diagnostic interview. In the program's early days, it was possible for LAIP students to interview each offender who entered the Wisconsin prison system. The student asked the offender a series of questions designed to identify issues that might be of concern to the offender - but also to identify issues that, although the offender did not realize it, might have a legal  [*800]  remedy. In addition to postconviction concerns, the interview might surface family law issues, tax or debt problems, health concerns, and other issues.
By conducting and following up on these detailed diagnostic interviews, LAIP students gained a holistic view not only of the client, but also of the legal system(s) in which the client was enmeshed. For example, an inmate client might be interested in obtaining sentence credit, but might also have mentioned in passing that his wife left him after he was first incarcerated and had conceived a child with another man. Investigation by the student would reveal that, because the client and his wife were still married, the client is presumed to be the child's father. n72 Further investigation might reveal that the client faced jail time following his release from prison for failing to pay support for this child. Finally, the student might learn that this "detainer" n73 was preventing the inmate from entering treatment programs, from moving from a medium-custody prison to a minimum-custody prison; and, ultimately, from being paroled. Thus, even though the client might not have realized that he was articulating a legal issue, the student might begin to recognize that, for this client, the family law and criminal justice systems interacted in complex ways. Under supervision, the student would learn that there was a legal remedy to the client's situation, in the form of a determination of the child's paternity in the context of a legal separation, annulment, or divorce. n74 Once the client's paternity was rebutted, the child support issue could be remedied, and the detainer preventing the client's correctional progress could be dismissed.
These diagnostic interviews, then, provided an excellent opportunity for law students to learn, from each inmate client's perspective, the daunting complexities of the criminal justice system and the other systems - family, mental health, immigration and social services - with which it intersects. They also provided an outstanding venue for empirical research into inmates' legal concerns, from the inmates' perspective. For example, as part of an LAIP research project in the late 1970s, inmates were interviewed about problems with access to, and accuracy of, their presentence investigation reports. n75 Similarly, in  [*801]  1984, LAIP students and faculty conducted empirical research regarding the variety of inmates' postconviction legal concerns. n76
By the 1990s, however, the Wisconsin prison population had grown to such an extent that it was no longer possible to conduct a diagnostic interview with every inmate who entered the system. n77 Moreover, the legal world had become more complex, making it difficult for generalists, both clinical faculty and students, to provide the best possible assistance to clients or develop an in-depth understanding of the legal and practical issues involved in multiple legal arenas. In particular, postconviction litigation in Wisconsin had become so replete with procedural complexities that large postconviction cases threatened to crowd out the smaller, more discrete (and often more successful) issues on which inmates needed assistance. n78 The Remington Center's clinical faculty also questioned whether these complex, and often unsuccessful, postconviction cases provided the best educational experience for students. Similarly, statutory changes in the 1990s had significantly complicated the substance and procedure of family law cases involving inmate litigants. n79 As a result, the program was providing neither the best service to individual clients and the larger systems involved, nor the best education to its students.
In 1998, following a self-study and retreat, the Remington Center's clinical faculty decided to divide the program's "LAIP assistance" to prison inmates among four different clinical projects: the "general" LAIP project, the Oxford federal project, the Family Law-Restorative Justice Project, and the Wisconsin Innocence Project. In this reorganization, the total number of students involved in assisting state and federal prison inmates did not change. However, each of the new projects now focuses on very different areas of substantive law. Students in the LAIP and Oxford projects continue to provide general legal assistance to state and federal prison inmates, primarily-but not  [*802]  exclusively-in the criminal law area. Students in the Family Law Project-Restorative Justice Project assist inmates with family law concerns, including divorce, custody, visitation, paternity, and child support. They also work on setting up and mediating victim-initiated meetings with offenders. Finally, students in the Wisconsin Innocence Project assist inmates who have claims of actual innocence based upon new evidence, including DNA evidence, witness recantations, and alibis.
Although the program has evolved from a generalist client-based clinic to a series of subject-matter clinical projects, the "systems" focus continues to inform the direction and pedagogy of the Remington Center clinics. Rather than developing a systems understanding from the perspective of a client with diverse legal concerns, the students now develop an in-depth understanding of more focused aspects of an increasingly complex justice system.
As they have developed a richer understanding of specific areas of law, students and faculty have found ways to better serve clients, as well as to identify and resolve systemic problems as they arise. For example, family law students have worked on larger, systemic projects, such as developing pro se family law manuals on a variety of family law issues for prison inmates, n80 and they are currently developing a more general advice manual for incarcerated parents. Family Law Project Director Leslie Shear has also worked closely with Wisconsin's Department of Workforce Development and the DOC, to mitigate the deductions taken from inmate accounts for child support processing expenses. Similarly, students in the LAIP Project have developed lesson plans and taught classes in the prisons to hundreds of inmates about early release under Wisconsin's new sentence adjustment statute. n81 Indeed, the DOC has recently asked LAIP to focus even more on assisting inmates with sentence adjustment petitions. n82 The increased expertise that has come from subject-matter specialization has also allowed the Center's students and clinical faculty to broaden their service goals beyond the needs of inmate clients. As a result of their increased expertise, they have been increasingly asked to put together symposia, provide legislative testimony, submit amicus curiae briefs, serve on committees, and publish articles, thus influencing the development of the law and policies in Wisconsin and nationwide. n83
 [*803]  The Wisconsin Innocence Project provides an example of how subject-matter specialization has resulted in new and different opportunities for the Remington Center's traditional systemic focus. In addition to representing individual clients, the Innocence Project has been extensively involved in larger, collaborative criminal justice reform efforts in Wisconsin. In the past few years, the Innocence Project's students and clinical faculty have submitted numerous amicus curiae briefs to the Wisconsin Supreme Court in criminal cases. In nearly all the cases that have been decided so far, the Court has adopted, in whole or in part, the approach suggested by the Innocence Project. n84 Clinical Professor Keith Findley, Co-Director of the Innocence Project, was a member of a bipartisan task force in the Wisconsin legislature created to examine the causes of wrongful convictions. Based upon the task force's recommendations, the legislature enacted statutes that require law enforcement agencies to develop guidelines governing eyewitness identification procedures, and that adopt a statewide policy of audio-or videotaping custodial interrogations. n85 The Innocence Project then worked cooperatively with the Wisconsin Attorney General's Office to develop model eyewitness identification guidelines, as well as training materials on the new guidelines, for use  [*804]  by law enforcement agencies throughout the state. n86 Currently, Prof. Findley and Prof. Dickey, along with Wisconsin Law School Professor Michael Smith, are members of the Wisconsin Criminal Justice Study Commission. The Commission, a joint project of the University of Wisconsin Law School, Marquette Law School, the Wisconsin State Bar, and the Wisconsin Attorney General's Office, is examining additional causes of wrongful convictions, with a goal of suggesting further legislative reforms. Recently, the Commission recommended increased funding to local law enforcement agencies, to allow the agencies to implement electronic recording of custodial interrogations. Currently, the Commission is examining solutions to the backlog of untested DNA samples at the Wisconsin State Crime Laboratory.
The Remington Center's 1998 reorganization has also forced us to revisit some of our own assumptions about clinical pedagogy. Over the last eight years, we have learned from trial and error that clinical experiences based on different areas of substantive law must be structured differently, and that we must modify our teaching methods to suit the kinds of cases involved and the needs of law students. For example, LAIP students work individually and have a relatively high case load (10-12 clients), since the clients' concerns, although varied, are fairly discrete and reasonably sized. Because the family law and restorative justice cases are often longer and more complex than the LAIP cases, these students generally have a lower case load (perhaps 6 -8 cases), and sometimes work together in pairs. n87 Each Innocence Project case tends to be huge; as a result, students may work on only a handful of cases during their time in the clinic-although they "screen" a much larger number of requests-and they frequently work in teams of two to five. n88 We continue to experiment with a variety of pedagogical methods for each project, including course length and number of credits, method of student participation (individual caseloads v. working in pairs or groups), methods of supervision, the nature and depth of written course materials, the use of simulation exercises, and the nature of an accompanying classroom course. As a result, we have become more thoughtful-and, we hope, more sophisticated - about structuring the students' clinical experiences in all of the projects.
Certainly, the Remington Center's reorganization to subject matter clinics has not been without challenges. Most obviously, breaking  [*805]  up the clinics by substantive legal areas goes against our overall philosophy that a client is a person, not a "case." n89 Our new approach has made it more difficult to take a holistic view of each client and his or her concerns. Although we attempt to resolve all of each client's concerns by referrals across the three projects, the experience for an individual student and/or client may be fragmented. Either the client's "tangential" concern must be referred out to a separate clinical project, or else a student in one project ends up trying to solve a legal problem that the student and supervising attorney know little about. We have worked to ameliorate these problems, in part by encouraging students to work with clinical faculty in other projects to address a client's concerns holistically. For example, a student in the Family Law-Restorative Justice Project, who is assisting an inmate with a divorce, might also work with a supervising attorney in the LAIP Project to represent the inmate in a motion for sentence modification or sentence credit.
Despite these challenges, we continue to hold true to Prof. Remington's broad view of the educational purpose of the Center's clinical projects: developing in each student a nuanced understanding of the "system" within which the student is working, enriching the student's understanding of the lawyer-client relationship; and developing the student's professional judgment. The Center thus educates students in "lawyering skills" in the broadest sense, developing in each student "adequate professional capacity to make a contribution" to the improvement of the justice system, whether as a professional working within the system, as a legislator or other community leader, or simply as an informed citizen. n90
The Remington Center also continues to serve a social justice mission by assisting inmate clients, among the neediest individuals in the state and the least able to resolve their own legal concerns. And with regard to their "specialty areas" - postconviction law and procedure, the family court system, and the correctional system - the students now understand the greater complexity of those systems much better than did earlier students. The Center has used its increased expertise to influence the development of the criminal justice system, both statewide and nationally. To that end, we believe that this transition has strengthened the Remington Center's social justice mission. But, as with our pedagogical goals, we continue to hold true Prof. Remington's broad vision of social justice: that a clinical program should be a "learning center" that would expose students to the complexities of law in action, in order to "fit the lawyer for the task of  [*806]  general political and social advisor to the community." n91
IV. Conclusion
 
 I opened this article by outlining some of the ongoing, and often vigorous, debates about the appropriate goals, structure, and methods of law school clinics. Although this debate is healthy and useful, it is important to avoid staking out rigid positions. Clinicians often criticize lawyers who approach all clients, and all legal issues, in the same way. We also criticize "traditional" law faculty who believe that the Socratic classroom method is the only way to teach law students. Why should a one-size-fits all pedagogy be any more appropriate for clinical education?
This article describes a different perspective-I call it a "systems approach" - that resulted in the development of clinical legal education at Wisconsin's Remington Center over forty years ago. In the 1950s, Frank Remington was profoundly influenced by his research into the criminal justice system, which showed that lawyers understood the "law on the books," but failed to understand the complexities of the law in action. He concluded that a new form of legal training was necessary to properly educate aspiring lawyers. Beginning in 1964, Prof. Remington developed a clinical experience that would allow law students to observe, and later to participate in, the complexities of the criminal justice and correctional systems. Prof. Remington defined both "skills" and "social justice" broadly, focusing on a systems-oriented, problem-solving, collaborative model of lawyering. The Remington Center has remained true to this vision, even as it has grown and modified its own pedagogical methods. I hope that this perspective will enrich the conversations among clinicians as they consider how best to educate their students, assist their clients, and improve the justice system.

Legal Topics: 

For related research and practice materials, see the following legal topics:
Criminal Law & ProcedurePostconviction ProceedingsImprisonmentCriminal Law & ProcedurePostconviction ProceedingsParoleGovernmentsCourtsJudges

 FOOTNOTES:

n1.  For an excellent overview of the history of clinical legal education in this country, see Margaret Martin Barry, Jon C. Dubin, & Peter A. Joy, Clinical Education for the Millennium: The Third Wave, 7 Clin. L. Rev. 1 (2000), especially the sources cited in n. 6. An older but still useful historical summary can be found in George S. Grossman, Clin. Legal Education: History and Diagnosis, 26 J. Legal Educ. 162 (1973-74). 

n2.  See, e.g., Robert M. Bastress & Joseph D. Harbaugh, Interviewing, Counseling, and Negotiating: Skills for Effective Representation (1990); David A. Binder, Paul B. Bergman, Susan C. Price, & Paul R. Tremblay, Lawyers as Counselors: A Client-Centered Approach (2d ed. 2004); Robert F. Cochran, Jr., John M.A. DiPippa, Martha M. Peters, The Counselor-at-Law: A Collaborative Approach to Client Interviewing and Counseling (2d ed. 2006); Stefan H. Krieger & Richard K. Neumann, Jr., Essential Lawyering Skills: Interviewing, Counseling, Negotiation, and Persuasive Fact Analysis (2d ed. 2003); Adam Babich, The Apolitical Law School Clinic, 11 Clin. L. Rev. 447 (2005), and A Reply to Wizner and Solomon's "Law as Politics," 11 Clin. L. Rev. 481 (2005); David A. Binder & Paul Bergman, Taking Lawyering Skills Training Seriously, 10 Clin. L. Rev. 191 (2003); John S. Elson, Why and How the Practicing Bar Must Rescue American Legal Education from the Misguided Priorities of American Legal Academia, 64 Tenn. L. Rev. 1135 (1997); Mary Helen McNeal, Unbundling and Law School Clinics: Where's the Pedagogy?, 7 Clin. L. Rev. 341 (2001). 

n3.  Certainly the "Bible" of early clinical legal education, Bellow and Moulton's The Lawyering Process, is organized in a way that emphasizes skills acquisition: nearly 1,000 of its 1,121 pages are devoted to specific lawyering tasks in the context of representing individual clients. See Gary Bellow & Bea Moulton, The Lawyering Process: Materials for Clinical Instruction in Advocacy (1978). An even earlier text is similarly organized around lawyering tasks. See Harrop A. Freeman & Henry Weihofen, Clinical Law Training: Interviewing and Counseling (1972). 

n4.  See, e.g., Binder & Bergman, supra note 2. 

n5.  Kimberly E. O'Leary, Clinical Law Offices and Local Social Justice Strategies: Case Selection and Quality Assessment as an Integral Part of the Social Justice Agenda of Clinics, 11 Clin. L. Rev. 335, 339 (2005). For examples of the "social justice" emphasis of early clinics, see Clinical Education for the Law Students: Legal Education in a Service Setting, Working Papers Prepared for the 1973 CLEPR National Conference (1973). See also Thomas F. Geraghty, Legal Clinics and the Better Trained Lawyer (Redux): A History of Clinical Education at Northwestern, 100 Nw. U. L. Rev. 231 (2006).
For more modern articulations of the social justice mission of law school clinics, see, e.g., Jane H. Aiken, Provocateurs for Justice, 7 Clin. L. Rev. 287 (2001); Frank S. Bloch & M.R.K. Prasad, Institutionalizing a Social Justice Mission for Clinical Legal Education: Cross-National Currents from India and the United States, 13 Clin. L. Rev. 165 (2006); Jon C. Dubin, Clinic Design for Social Justice Imperatives, 51 SMU L. Rev. 1461(1998); Spencer Rand, Teaching Law Students to Practice Social Justice: An Interdisciplinary Search for Help Through Social Work's Empowerment Approach, 13 Clin. L. Rev. 459 (2006); Antoinette Sedillo-Lopez, Learning Through Service in a Clinical Setting: The Effect of Specialization on Social Justice and Skills Training, 7 Clin.. L. Rev. 307 (2001); Louise G. Trubek & Jennifer J. Farnham, Social Justice Collaboratives: Multidisciplinary Practices for People, 7 Clin. L. Rev. 227 (2000); Stephen Wizner, Beyond Skills Training, 7 Clin. L. Rev. 327 (2001); Stephen Wizner & Robert Solomon, Law as Politics: A Response to Adam Babich, 11 Clin. L. Rev. 473 (2006). 

n6.  Frank Askin, A Law School Where Students Don't Just Learn the Law; They Help Make the Law, 51 Rutgers L. Rev. 855, 856 (1999). Askin is the most outspoken proponent of this social justice goal of law school clinics. In an article describing Rutgers' Constitutional Litigation Clinic, he observes that "in three decades of clinical law teaching, I have paid scant attention to instruction in [lawyering tasks], and have dealt with issues of effective advocacy mainly in the context of complex impact litigation." Id. 

n7.  Frank Askin, Defending Rights: A Life in Law and Politics 199 (1997). 

n8.  For an early discussion of this issue, see Grossman, supra note 1, at 176-177. More recently, David Chavkin has argued that large case clinics "represent a corruption of clinical education" because they deprive students of the opportunity to take responsibility for the cases and see them through from start to finish. David F. Chavkin, Spinning Straw into Gold: Exploring the Legacy of Bellow & Moulton, 10 Clin. L. Rev. 245, 264 (2003). In contrast, Paul Reingold argues that big, complex, high-profile cases may provide an excellent student experience, compared to small, specialized cases. Paul D. Reingold, Why Hard Cases Make Good (Clinical) Law, 2 Clin. L. Rev. 545 (1996). See also Nancy M. Maurer, Handling Big Cases in Law School Clinics, or Lessons from My Clinic Sabbatical, 9 Clin. L. Rev. 879 (2003). Reingold's assumes that a specialized clinic necessarily entails routine, limited, and ultimately boring cases. Reingold, supra, at 552-53. Subject-matter based clinics can, but need not, involve either small cases or routine cases. The cases handled by the Remington Center's Innocence Project are specialized, but they are anything but small. Conversely, the cases in the Remington Center's LAIP Project tend to be fairly small and manageable, but they cover a wide range of issues, from tax problems to pending criminal charges. Both projects will be discussed in greater detail later in this article. 

n9.  Austin Sarat and Stuart Scheingold argue that lawyers are "entitled, even obligated to serve objectives that transcend service to clients... . cause lawyers also serve their clients but tend to see client service as a means to their moral and political ends." Stuart A. Scheingold & Austin Sarat, Something to Believe in: Politics, Professionalism, and Cause Lawyering 6-7 (2004). 

n10.  Gerald P. Lopez, Rebellious Lawyering: One Chicano's Vision of Progressive Law Practice 3 (1992) ("What these activist lawyers did seem inclined to do was to equate what they already did best (or most often) with what would most help us. Many, for example, seemed to think litigating a case was 'naturally' what it meant to work on a problem.") Lopez, who found law school to be "cold, distant, and alienating," suggests that "rebellious lawyering" would encourage clients and lawyers to share problem-solving duties, to link their collaboration to the work of other professional and lay problem-solvers." Id. at 4, 83. See also Ascanio Piomelli, The Democratic Roots of Collaborative Lawyering, 12 Clin. L. Rev. 541 (2006). 

n11.  See, e.g. Chavkin, supra note 8, at 262; Katherine R. Kruse, Biting Off What They Can Chew, 8 Clin. L. Rev. 405, 407 n.6 (2002). 

n12.  See supra notes 6-8. 

n13.  This debate, too, is as old as clinical legal education. John Bradway, an early pioneer in the field, asserted that clinical education "takes us away from the orthodox field of law which we may describe as topical ... . and involves a different sort of breakdown, which we call functional. Our point of departure is: the client's problem." John S. Bradway, Cleon H. Foust, Nellie MacNamara, David E. Snodgrass & G. Kenneth Reiblich, Legal Clinics For Law Students - A Symposium, 7 J. Legal Educ. 204, 208 (1954). In Bradway's view, the traditional case method of classroom legal education was divided up by doctrinal subject matter, whereas in the clinic, the law student met an individual with problems that could easily cross subject-matter lines.
Yet the concept of simply having the client present the student with assorted legal concerns raised its own set of difficulties. In 1974, George Grossman outlined problems that arose at the outset of the clinical movement with CLEPR-funded Office of Equal Opportunity clinics. These clinics, which were organized around a client base, entailed high case loads in restricted fields of law, resulting in "repetition, low-level work, heavy caseloads, strain on students' time, failure to focus on underlying legal concepts and loose supervision." See Grossman, supra note 1, at 176, quoting Council on Legal Education for Professional Responsibility [CLEPR] First Biennial Report 13 (1971). Allen Redlich raised similar concerns about an early CLEPR-style legal aid clinic at the University of Wisconsin Law School. Alan Redlich, Perceptions of a Clinical Program, 44. S. Cal. L. Rev. 574 (1971). 

n14.  See, e.g. Michael C. Meltsner & Philip G. Schrag, Report from a CLEPR Colony, 76 Colum. L. Rev. 581, 624 (1976). Schrag has continued to struggle with the question of depth versus breadth. See Philip G. Schrag, Constructing a Clinic, 3 Clin. L. Rev. 175, 191-194 (1996). 

n15.  Sedillo-Lopez, supra note 5. 

n16.  David F. Chavkin, supra note 8, at 268. See also Dubin, supra note 5, at 1491 ("Recognizing that clients often present interrelated legal problems cutting across the subject matter of two or more clinical programs ... . Priority is provided to addressing the multiple legal needs of clients in order to represent the whole person"). 

n17.  For simplicity's sake, this article focuses on the Remington Center's prison-based clinics. However, the Center also includes several other in-house clinics in a variety of civil and criminal law areas. In the Criminal Appeals Project, law students represents criminal defendants (who are not necessarily incarcerated) on direct appeal of their convictions. For a detailed description of the Criminal Appeals Project, see John Pray and Byron Lichstein, The Evolution Through Experience of Criminal Clinics: The Criminal Appeals Project at the University of Wisconsin Law School's Remington Center, 75 Miss. L. J. 795 (2006). The Center's Economic Justice Institute includes three clinics that provide assistance to low-income Madison residents: the Consumer Law Clinic, in which law students provide representation and education to individuals and groups about consumer issues; the Family Court Assistance Project, in which students assist pro se litigants in shepherding their cases through the Dane County family courts; and the Neighborhood Law Project, in which students assist low-income clients with benefits, landlord-tenant, and wage and hour claims. For a discussion of substantive and pedagogical issues raised by the Neighborhood Law Project, see Juliet M. Brodie, Post-Welfare Lawyering: Clinical Legal Education and a New Poverty Law Agenda, Wash. U. J. L. & Pol'y 201 (2006). The Center also includes two externship projects, the Prosecution Project and the Public Defender Project, which combine classroom instruction with summer placements in District Attorney or Public Defender offices throughout Wisconsin. A more complete description of all the Remington Center's clinics is available at http://www.law.wisc.edu/FJR/. 

n18.  During its forty-plus years of existence, the program has undergone a number of incarnations, and numerous names, which can cause a certain amount of confusion to non-Wisconsin readers. In any event, the overall program was renamed the Frank J. Remington Center in 1996, when it moved out of an off-campus building and into the newly-renovated Law School. For simplicity's sake, this article refers to the program as the Remington Center throughout its history. 

n19.  See Bellow & Moulton, supra note 3. 

n20.  Published volumes included Robert O. Dawson, Sentencing: The Decision as to Type, Length, and Conditions of Sentence (1969); Wayne R. LaFave, Arrest: The Decision to Take a Suspect into Custody (1965); Frank W. Miller, Prosecution: The Decision to Charge a Suspect with a Crime (1969); Donald J. Newman, Conviction: The Determination of Guilt or Innocence without Trial (1966); Lawrence P. Tiffany, Donald M. McIntyre, Jr. and Daniel L. Rotenberg, Detection of Crime: Stopping and Questioning, Search and Seizure, Encouragement and Entrapment (1967). Many years later, a follow-up volume was published entitled Discretion in Criminal Justice: The Tension Between Individualization and Uniformity (Frank. J. Remington & Lloyd Ohlin eds., 1993).
The empirical approach of the ABF survey was particularly influential in the area of policing, "stimulating research about the basic functioning of police that would fundamentally change the entire field." Draft Research Proposal, from Dr. Mark H. Moore, Dr. Catharine Coles & Dr. George Kelling, to the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University C3 (Aug. 13, 1996) (manuscript, copy on file with author). Prof. Remington's Wisconsin colleague Herman Goldstein (who got his start as a field researcher on the ABF Study) is considered the pioneer of "problem oriented policing." Prof. Goldstein's research was reflected in a number of influential policy documents, including President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society (1967). Prof. Goldstein's work in the policing area has been continued and expanded on by Remington Center Clinical Associate Professor Michael Scott, who is the Director of the Center for Problem-Oriented Policing. See http://www. popcenter.org/ 

n21.  Draft Research Proposal, supra note 20, at C1. 

n22.  Id. at C1. 

n23.  Id. at C2. 

n24.  Edward L. Kimball, Frank J. Remington: Contributions to Criminal Justice 35 (1993). Kimball notes that "the candor in the actions of those observed is indicated by the frequency with which they did something 'not correct,' as illustrated by the policeman who visited his bookie while the researcher watched." Id. 

n25.  These field reports are available at the University of Wisconsin Law Library. 

n26.  Kimball, supra note 24, at 47. See also Draft Research Proposal, supra note 20, at C2. 

n27.  To give just one example, even in the 1950s, criminal defendants were pleading guilty in most cases. Yet it was not until a decade later (and at least partly as a result of the ABF Survey) that guilty pleas were recognized by the formal doctrines of criminal procedure, and that plea processes were required to comport with due process. See, e.g., Duncan v. Louisiana, 391 U.S. 145, 190 n. 41 (1968); Boykin v. Alabama, 395 U.S. 238 (1969). 

n28.  Frank W. Miller, Report of Use in 1959 Seminar at Washington University School of Law of Pilot Project report of ABA Survey of the Administration of Criminal Justice in the United States 4 (manuscript, copy on file with author). 

n29.  Kimball, supra note 24, at 114. 

n30.  Id. 

n31.  Id. (emphasis in the original). 

n32.  Id. at 122. Obviously, the question becomes what we mean by "skills training." The McCrate Report's emphasis on "skills and values" actually comports fairly closely with Prof. Remington's focus on developing professional responsibility and judgment, broadly defined. For example, in a 1999 memorandum to the law faculty, the Remington Center's directors quoted with approval from the McCrate Report. Memorandum from Walter Dickey and Meredith Ross, to the Law Faculty, University of Wisconsin Law School (Mar. 3, 1999). Similarly, a memorandum to the Remington Center's students nearly twenty years earlier quoted at length from a report on lawyer competency prepared by the American Bar Association's Section on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, and described, in some detail, how the Center's educational projects gave students the opportunity to learn the skills and values outlined in that report. Memorandum from Walter Dickey and Frank Remington, to Student Members of the Legal Assistance Program (July 15, 1980) (copies of both manuscripts on file with author).
Nor do I want to exaggerate the difference between Wisconsin's early correctional internship programs and other clinics around the country. For example, Bea Moulton asserts that the goals of The Lawyering Process "did not include developing proficiency in the skill areas covered by the book," but instead focused on "the acquisition of the professional role." Susan Bryant and Elliot S. Milstein, Reflections on the 25th Anniversary of The Lawyering Process: An Introduction to the Symposium, 10 Clin. L. Rev. 1, 8 (2003). However, given the organization of The Lawyering Process-by lawyering task-it is unsurprising that "clinical education" and skills education" are often viewed as synonymous. And many clinicians see nothing wrong with that; see, e.g., Binder & Bergman, supra note 2. But "skills development" was never an organizing principle of Wisconsin's correctional internship program. 

n33.  Memorandum Proposal from Frank J. Remington to William Pincus, The Ford Foundation 1, 8-9 (Mar. 18, 1964) (seeking funds for internships in the area of policing, to supplement the correctional internships that Prof. Remington had already developed) (manuscript, copy on file with author). The proposal was successful, and the policing internships commenced in 1965, lasting for five years, when funding limitations ended the program. In the summer of 2007, the Remington Center will inaugurate the Gary P. Hayes Police-Prosecution internships, summer placements in which law students will work collaboratively with a police agency and prosecutor's office in a particular jurisdiction to study, analyze, and suggest solutions to a particular public safety problem in the jurisdiction. 

n34.  Kimball, supra note 24, at 121-122. 

n35.  Undated Memorandum to the Division of Corrections 1 (circa. 1965) (manuscript, copy on file with author). 

n36.  Id. at 2. 

n37.  Id. at 3. 

n38.  Id. at 2-9. 

n39.  Id. at 3. 

n40.  Id. at 2-9. A decade later, Walter Dickey, then a supervising attorney in the LAIP Project, drafted such guidelines for the DOC. The guidelines have been revised and expanded over the years, and now appear as Wis. Admin. Code Chs. DOC 302-333. Prof. Dickey went on to become a member of the Law School's tenured faculty. From 1983-1987, he took a leave of absence from the Law School to serve as the head of the Wisconsin DOC. Upon returning to the Law School, Prof. Dickey took over for Prof. Remington as Director of the Remington Center. He is currently Faculty Director of the Center. 

n41.  Jerome Frank, Why Not a Clinical-Lawyer School? 81 Univ. of Penn. L. Rev. 907, 913 (1933). 

n42.  Id. at 916-920; see also Jerome Frank, A Plea for Lawyer-Schools, 56 Yale L. J. 1303 (1946-47). 

n43.  See, e.g., two seminal essays by Prof. Remington's colleagues at Wisconsin, which were recently included in The Canon of American Legal Thought (David Kennedy & William W. Fischer III eds. 2006). They are Stewart Macaulay, Non-Contractual Relations in Business: A Preliminary Study (originally published in 28 Amer. Soc. Rev. 1 (1963)); and Marc Galanter, Why the Haves Come out Ahead: Speculations on the Limits of Legal Change (originally published in 9 L. & Soc'y Rev. 165 (1974)). See also note 20, supra, discussing Herman Goldstein's research into policing; and Stewart Macaulay, Wisconsin's Legal Tradition. 24 Gargoyle 6-10 (1994) (discussing the "law in-action" work of Wisconsin faculty members Nate Feinsinger in labor law, Jake Beuscher in property law, and Willard Hurst in legal history). 

n44.  Stewart Macaulay, The New Versus the Old Legal Realism: "Things Ain't What they Used to Be," 2005 Wis. L. Rev. 365, 386 (2005). 

n45.  Quoting Grant Gilmore, Prof. Macaulay observes, "In Heaven there will be no law, and the lion will lie down with the lamb ... . The worse the society, the more law there will be. In Hell there will be nothing but law, and due process will be meticulously observed." Id. at 392. 

n46.  Id. at 379-80. 

n47.  Id. at 389. 

n48.  See notes 20 through 33, and accompanying text. 

n49.  Arthur F. McEvoy, A New Realism for Legal Studies, 2005 Wis. L. Rev. 433, 434. 

n50.  Willard Hurst, Changing Responsibilities of the Law School: 1868-1968, 1968 Wis. L. Rev. 336, 337. 

n51.  Kenneth B. Davis, Law in Action, The Dean's View, at 1, available at www. law.wisc.edu/Davislawinactionessay.htm. The idea that the law faculty's expertise should serve the larger community has deep historical roots at Wisconsin. See, e.g., John E. Conway, The Law School: Service to the State and Nation, 1968 Wis. L. Rev. 345; W. Scott Van Alston, Jr., The University of Wisconsin Law School 1868-1968: An Outline History, 1968 Wis. L. Rev. 321. Hurst, supra note 50; Paul D. Carrington and Erika King, Law and the Wisconsin Idea, 47 J. Legal Educ. 297 (1997). 

n52.  Law School Clinical Programs, 20 Gargoyle 8 (1999-90) (quoting from a turn-of-the-century Chicago Tribune article). 

n53.  Kimball, supra note 24, at 69-70. 

n54.  Id. at 118. 

n55.  Id. 

n56.  Originally called the Victim-Offender Reconciliation Project (VORP), this project has evolved into the Restorative Justice Project, now conjoined with the Family Law Project. 

n57.  393 U.S. 483 (1969), later bolstered by the Supreme Court's ruling in Bounds v. Smith, 430 U.S. 817 (1976), that prison inmates have a constitutional right to access to the court system. 

n58.  As a simple example: an LAIP student might file a successful motion to obtain two years of sentence credit owed to an inmate. This would result in a fair, accurate result for the inmate-his sentence was no longer than the judge originally intended. It would also save the DOC two years of unwarranted bed space. 

n59.  See, e.g., Walter Dickey and Frank Remington, Legal Assistance for Institutionalized Persons-An Overlooked Need, 1 S. Ill. U. L. J. 175 (1976); Walter Dickey, The Lawyer and the Quality of Service to the Poor and Disadvantaged Client, 27 Depaul L. Rev. 407 (1978); Edward L. Kimball, Introduction to Inmate Problems and Correctional Administration, 1969 Wis. L. Rev. 571. Indeed the Remington Center's cooperative relationship with the DOC was such that the DOC allowed the Center's faculty and students to develop and teach a paralegal training program for inmates at one institution. See Ben Kempinen, Prisoner Access to Justice and Paralegals: The Fox Lake Paralegal Program, 14 N.E. J. Crim. & Civ. Confinement 67 (1988). 

n60.  The Remington Center still declines to represent inmates in conditions of confinement cases. Up until the mid-1990s, the Wisconsin State Public Defender represented inmates in such cases. However, in 1995, the state legislature stripped the Public Defender of its authority over such issues. As a result, most inmates are required to proceed pro se in such matters. Telephone interview with Martha Askins, Assistant State Public Defender (Jan. 5, 2007). To at least partially remedy this lack of assistance, the Remington Center has developed extensive pro se materials for inmates to use in challenging decisions by DOC officials on conditions of confinement issues such as prison discipline and inmate complaints. 

n61.  For example, in 1983 the Wisconsin legislature implemented a new sentencing system. Convicted defendants were given the opportunity to "opt in" to the new system. Depending on their sentence structure, some inmates were better off under the old system, while others were better off with the new. With the cooperation of the DOC, LAIP supervising attorneys and students met with hundreds of inmates to advise each on whether or not to opt in. Email from Ben Kempinen, Clinical Associate Professor of Law, to Meredith Ross, Director of the Frank J. Remington Center (Nov. 21, 2006). Due in part to its collaborative relationship with corrections, the Remington Center has continued to assist a large number of inmates. For example, in 2005-06, the Center's four prison projects assisted 1,170 state inmates and 166 federal inmates. 

n62.  In 2006, these contracts brought in an annual sum of about $ 300,000. Pursuant to its agreements, the Remington Center reports to each agency on the number of contacts (in person or by phone) with inmates, the kinds of issues raised, and the level of service provided (from "interview only" to litigation); but the Center maintains confidentiality with regard to the specific concerns of its inmate clients. 

n63.  See, e.g., Symposium: The 25th Anniversary of Gary Bellow's and Bea Mouton's The Lawyering Process, 10 Clin. L. Rev. 1 (2003). The focus and structure of the Remington Center's early correctional internship program also stand in sharp contrast to Wisconsin's contemporaneous, and failed, experiment with a large volume, off-campus, legal aid clinic. See Redlich, supra note 13. 

n64.  See articles cited supra note 59. 

n65.  See, e.g., Edward L. Kimball, Correctional Internships-A Wisconsin Experiment in Education for Professional Responsibility, 18 J. Legal Educ. 86 (1965-66); Kimball, supra note 24, at 113-126; Dickey, supra note 59. 

n66.  Over the years, the Remington Center's students and clinical faculty have authored over well over a hundred articles, theses, and policy papers on substantive legal issues arising directly from their work in the program (bibliography on file with author). Part III of this article will provide some examples of other ways in which the Center's students and faculty have used the information available to them to improve the justice system. 

n67.  Memorandum from Walter J. Dickey to the University of Wisconsin Law Faculty 7 (Jan. 27, 1990) (manuscript, copy on file with author). 

n68.  Letter to Professors Remington and Dickey from an LAIP graduate, now a county District Attorney (manuscript, copy on file with author). 

n69.  As noted earlier, supra note 17, the Remington Center's Economic Justice Institute also includes several non-prison based clinics. These are described more fully at http://www.law.wisc.edu/FJR/ 

n70.  Memoranda to the law faculty throughout the 1980s and 1990 demonstrate a consistent fidelity to the "systems" approach to clinical legal education, in terms of both legal education and social justice. For example, in 1979, Professors Remington, Dickey, and Goldstein asserted that the LAIP program:

 combines the education of law students, research, and service to state agencies and a highly disadvantaged segment of the Wisconsin citizenry. It provides an opportunity for law students, faculty, and persons outside the university to come together to deal with important issues which require for their resolution the best kinds of knowledge that can be developed in a university setting.

 Memorandum from Walter Dickey, Herman Goldstein, and Frank Remington, to Arnon Allen and Orrin Helstad 13 (June 4, 1979) (manuscript, copy on file with author). In a 1987 program report to the Law School's Board of Visitors, the Remington Center's Legal Assistance to Institutionalized Persons (LAIP) Project was described as follows:

 Perhaps too frequently, clinical education is equated with skills training, the assumption being that the primary aim of clinical programs is teaching the "nuts and bolts" techniques needed to be a competent lawyer. To be sure, LAIP provides law students with an opportunity to develop many of the skills necessary to effective advocacy, including interviewing, research, writing, and oral presentation. Yet, it is misleading to view training in these skills as the sole or even primary educational purpose of the program... . LAIP provides students with the opportunity to see, first hand, how the correctional and mental health systems work at the state and federal levels. Through direct encounters with actors in the system-prosecutors, defense counsel, judges, corrections personnel, as well as the inmates and patients-students are able to consider what sorts of policies and procedures are likely to lead to the most effective and fair administration of justice. Given the opportunity to observe the system and reflect upon its strengths and shortcomings, [they] are likely to discover ways to work within it and improve upon it... . Students enrolled in LAIP also personally observe the profound human consequences of an individuals involvement in the judicial system ... . LAIP provides students with a view of the system from the offenders' perspective, a rare view for the practicing lawyer.

 LAIP Program Report to the University of Wisconsin Law School Board of Visitors 2-3 (Nov. 1987) (manuscript, copy on file with author). And in 1990, Prof. Dickey asserted:

 If it were up to me, I would abandon the term "clinical" to describe the program because it suggests an over-emphasis on "how-to-do-it" ... . The greatest need in the profession is for people who can explore the interplay of law on the books, law-in-action, the facts of the case, the values of the client, [and] the social setting and come to sensible judgments about the goals of representation that are helpful to clients.

 Memorandum from Walter J. Dickey to the Law Faculty at the University of Wisconsin Law School (Nov. 27, 1999) (manuscript, copy on file with author). 

n71.  By the early 1990s, the Remington Center's clinical faculty had achieved some degree of career longevity, developed a vocabulary of clinical pedagogy and begun thinking systematically about what methods we could use to best educate law students (thanks primarily to our colleagues Judy Olingy and Kate Kruse, who educated their fellow clinicians about teaching issues through a combination of monthly "educational staffings" and annual educational retreats). For examples of some of these ideas, see Brodie, supra note 17; Keith A. Findley, Rediscovering the Lawyer School: Curriculum Reform in Wisconsin, 24 Wis. Intl. L.J. 295 (2006); Keith A. Findley, The Pedagogy of Innocence: Reflections on the Role of Innocence Projects in Clinical Legal Education, 13 Clin. L. Rev. 231 (2006); Kruse, supra note 11; Pray & Lichstein, supra note 17. Thus, by the mid-1990s, the Remington Center had arrived at a place that was probably not all that different from other clinics nationwide; but its path there was a great deal different. 

n72.  See Wis. Stat. §891.41(1)(a). 

n73.  A detainer is a request about an inmate that is filed with the DOC by a government agency, such as state or federal prosecutors, the federal immigration authorities, or a county child support agency. A detainer may ask the DOC to hold an inmate for the agency when the inmate released from prison, or simply to notify the agency when the inmate is released. 

n74.  See Wis. Stat. §891.41(2). 

n75.  See Walter Dickey, The Lawyer and the Accuracy of the Presentence Report, 43 Fed. Probation 28 (June 1979). 

n76.  Ben Kempinen, Diagnostic Research Project: The Offenders' Viewpoint (Nov. 19, 1984) (manuscript, copy on file with author). 

n77.  Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, about 30 inmates per month entered the prison system, and the total of incarcerated offenders hovered around 2000. The prison population rose slowly during the 1980s and sharply during the 1990s. By 1990, there were about 7,000 inmates in the Wisconsin prison system. Telephone call with Walter J. Dickey (Jan. 24, 2007). Currently, there are about 22,000 inmates in Wisconsin prisons. Weekly population reports are provided on the Wisconsin Department of Corrections web site http://www.wi-doc.com/index adult.htm 

n78.  See, e.g., State v. Knight, 158 Wis. 2d 509, 484 N.W.2d 540 (1992); State v. Escalona-Naranjo, 185 Wis. 2d 168, 517 N.W.2d 157 (1994); State ex rel. Rothering v. McCaughtry, 205 Wis. 2d 675, 680, 556 N.W.2d 136, 139 (Ct. App. 1996); State v. Lo, 2003 WI 107, 264 Wis. 2d 1, 665 N.W.2d 756 (2003). 

n79.  In particular, the complexities of Wisconsin's "Prisoner Litigation Reform Act," which were designed to discourage lawsuits by prisoners, applied to all "civil cases," including family law cases. See Wis. Stat. §§801.02(7), 802.05(3), 807.15, 814.29, and 893.735. 

n80.  See Kruse, supra note 11. 

n81.  Wis. Stat. §973.195. 

n82.  See Meredith J. Ross, Sentence Modification and Early Release for TIS Inmates, Wisconsin Defender 1 (Winter/Spring 2005). 

n83.  For example, four of the authors in the Wisconsin Law Review's 2005 symposium on wrongful convictions were current or former Remington Center clinicians. See Mary Prosser, Reforming Criminal Discovery: Why Old Objections Must Yield to New Realities, 2006 Wis. L. Rev. 541; Keith A. Findley & Michael S. Scott, The Multiple Dimensions of Tunnel Vision in Criminal Cases, 2006 Wis. L. Rev. 291; Katherine R. Kruse, Instituting Innocence Reform: Wisconsin's New Governance Experiment, 2006 Wis. L. Rev. 645. Each of these articles demonstrates a "systems" approach to criminal justice issues ranging from discovery limitations, to the cognitive bias of "tunnel vision," to the process of instituting law reform. 

n84.  See State v. McDowell, 2004 WI 70, 272 Wis. 2d 488, 681 N.W.2d 500 (2004) (Court adopts Innocence Project's proposed test for attorney to use in determining whether client intends to testify untruthfully); State v. Jerrell C. J., 2005 WI 105, 283 Wis. 2d 145, 699 N.W.2d 110 (2005) (Court mandates electronic recording of juvenile confessions); State v. Moran, 2005 WI 115, 284 Wis. 2d 24, 700 N.W.2d 884 (2005) (Court adopts Innocence Project's interpretation of Wisconsin's statute on postconviction DNA testing); State v. Armstrong, 2005 WI 119, 283 Wis. 2d 639, 700 N.W.2d 98 (2005) (Court adopts Innocence Project's suggested standard for a new trial based on new evidence); State v. Dubose, 2005 WI 126, 285 Wis. 2d 143, 699 N.W.2d 582 (2005) (Court rejects the admissibility of overly suggestive eyewitness identifications, particularly if based on showups); State v. Shomberg, 2006 WI 9, 288 Wis. 2d 1, 709 N.W.2d 370 (2006) (Court declines to adopt Innocence Project's proposal that expert testimony about eyewitness identifications be presumptively admissible, but "encourages circuit court judges to carefully consider, in each case, whether the admissibility of eyewitness expert testimony would be helpful to the trier of fact"); State v. Hibl, 2006 WI 52, 290 Wis. 2d 595, 714 N.W.2d 194 (2006) (addressing test circuit court should use in determining admissibility of eyewitness identification where witness accidentally encountered defendant outside of courtroom). See also Keith A. Findley, Learning from Our Mistakes: A Criminal Justice Commission to Study Wrongful Convictions, 38 Cal. W. L. Rev. 333 (2002); Keith A. Findley, New Laws Reflect the Power and Potential of DNA, 75 Wis. Law. 20 (May, 2002). 

n85.  See Wis. Stat. §§175.50, 938.195, 968.073, and 972.115. 

n86.  For the Department of Justice guidelines, go to: http://www.doj.state.wi.us/dles/tns/modelpolicydraft.pdf 

n87.  See, e.g. Kruse, supra note 11, describes the involvement of the Family Law Project students in developing pro se manuals. 

n88.  For a more complete description of the educational goals and methods of the Wisconsin Innocence Project, see Findley, supra note 71. 

n89.  See Chavkin, supra note 8, at 268. 

n90.  See Kimball, supra note 24, at 114. 

n91.  Miller, supra note 28.