Journeys to 20th Street: The Inner City as Critical Pedagogical Space for Legal Education

This essay draws on critical geographical theories to propose that the location of clinical legal education programs in inner city space can affect the production of professional identities and ideologies oflaw students. It anchors its analysis in an examination of the clinical law program at the University of Saskatchewan College of Law, where students work at a poverty law clinic in Saskatoon's inner city. The paper first turns to a critical examination of law school space, which can function to promote dominant notions about law and legal practice. The author cautions that ifnot navigated attentively, thejourney to inner city space from the elite space of the law school can reinforce in students dominant notions about poverty,class, race, and legal practice itself. However, critical pedagogical strategies, which attempt to reveal inner city space as "thirdspace," where communities and clients are actively resisting injustice, may open up space for clinical law students to examine traditional notions of law and legalpractice and imagine new possibilities of working with communities for justice.