Jerome Frank may have suggested the term Clinical Legal Education (CLE) first when he asked “Why Not a Clinical Lawyer School?”2; but, it was not until the New York City based Council on Legal Education for Professional Responsibility (CLEPR), funded by the Ford Foundation, took the pre-eminently active role in promoting and supporting law school-based experimentation in the 1970s and 1980s that CLE truly had an opportunity to develop. Over the past thirty plus years CLE has become more and more central to legal education, especially in the United States; innovations elsewhere have been fewer, more modest, and slower to develop, but of significance to the shifting culture of law learning, wherever they have taken place. The inception of the Journal3 marks an important milestone in the continuing development of CLE; for with this volume, we formally recognise that CLE is a vitally important and diverse phenomenon with a global reach.
