Clinical legal education has become a particularly successful aspect of Yale-China's law program. Clinical law programs in the U.S. and China teach student lawyers how to practice law through the actual representation of clients before the courts. From intake to litigation, students are supervised by a law professor or, as in the case below, by a team of Chinese law professors and a Yale-China Law Fellow.

Legal education clinics teach students practical skills such as interviewing clients and witnesses, counseling, fact development, negotiation, litigation, media advocacy and community education. As they practice these skills in real-life cases, the students also absorb important principles of legal ethics and professional responsibility, such as using one's training to effect social change and incorporating pro bono work into a legal career. Most clinic clients are referred from legal aid centers, which serve indigent citizens. As a result, law school clinical programs are becoming a valuable public service to Chinese citizens.

Here is an example of a public assistance case undertaken by Chinese law students, as described by former Yale-China Law Fellow, Carl Minzner, who served as one of the students' advisers:

A Workplace Accident

The Facts:

The client was employed in a small, unregistered and out-of-the home furniture shop. The client was working on a lathe at the shop, when the lathe broke and mangled his fingers. The employer took the client to hospital #1, which said it could save his finger but wanted 2,000 RMB as a down payment. Thinking this price too high, the employer took the worker to less-expensive hospital #2 and signed him in as a patient. Hospital #2 partially amputated one finger. The client returned home but was unable to work for a period of time and had medical costs and associated expenses. The client sought compensation from the employer; when the employer refused, the client came to the clinic.

Key Questions:

After interviewing the client and reviewing the legal issues of the case on their own, the students came to their professors with four questions: 1) How does one respond to a client who doesn't know what to request for damages? 2) Was it a criminal violation for the second hospital to operate without consent? 3) Should they sue the first hospital to get the information regarding the fact that the finger could have been saved? 4) Do China's labor laws apply to this case?

The Court:

The court slated to hear the students' case is within the lowest level of the four-tiered Chinese court system. Three people hear the cases before this court: one shenpanzhang (审判长, presiding judge) and two renmin peishenyuan (人民陪审员, people's jurors). People's jurors (ordinary citizens, often with no legal training) technically have equal status with the presiding judge, but in fact act as total non-entities. In this case they didn't even look at the evidence, and one of them left the hearing for about an hour. In contrast, the judge was pretty much on par with the New York Department of Labor administrative judges that I've seen—she had a good grip on what was important, looked at all the evidence, blew past some of the random arguments our students made and kept everything moving along.

To anyone who has ever handled an administrative hearing like this in the U.S., the experience was almost exactly the same here in China. Hearings involved a tiny room, informal procedures and judges accustomed to handling the cases themselves without the presence of lawyers or client representatives. Client representatives, however, provide the key role of organizing what could be an otherwise totally disorganized client. These hearings present an excellent opportunity for students to practice basic lawyering skills.

The Hearings:

On behalf of their client, my students sought to recover compensation for the lost finger, back wages, pain and suffering, etc. In court at the first hearing, the judge ruled that the employer pay back wages. In the second hearing, the court is considering all other matters. (The ruling has not been made.) The employer also was represented by law students—not from a clinic, I might add. I thought the contrast in how my students represented their client and how the other side was represented attested to the value of the clinical experience. Our students had their client's testimony prepped and ready; the employer simply rambled for half an hour with no guidance by his representatives. The employer offered a witness declaration from another employee, which turned out to be totally contradicted by the employee's oral testimony. (Our students nailed down the fact that the other employee hadn't even been present at the accident.)

Lessons Learned:

After everything was over, our students reviewed their mistakes. Their biggest error, which could have cost them the case, was their insistence (in spite of our warnings to them in an advance preparatory session) on characterizing the employer as "forcing" (强迫, qiángpò) their client to use the lathe, instead of "having" (让, ràng) him use it. Not only did they have no actual support for this (it was simply the way their client phrased it to them initially), but the error got the whole trial going in the wrong direction. The lathe was illegal to begin with (we had the relevant regulation), and if we could prove that the accident occurred in the course of regular business and our client had not been egregiously negligent, we would win. But the other side called us on the phrasing, and then drew the court into a discussion of whether our client was "using"(!) the lathe during his lunch break, and whether he should have been using it at all.

The students recognized their client preparation hadn't been totally thorough, and they needed to organize the evidence better than they did. They had been embarrassed when the judge asked for original documents. The students realized in court that they only had copies and the originals were with the defendant's sister. A student had to run out to get the papers. In all, it was a pretty good clinical education experience. But it definitely felt a little more "loose" than comparable clinical experiences in the U.S. In short, in the Chinese clinic's case, the issues were more important, greater interests were at stake, the environment and process was less formal, and the students were younger and less experienced.