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BABSEA CLE International Externship Clinic Information
| Overview | The BABSEA CLE Legal Studies Externship Program offers an opportunity to make a real contribution to helping people achieve access to justice in Southeast Asia while being involved in a remarkable experience of living and working in the region. This is an experience that is impossible to gain as a simple tourist.Since 2004 the BABSEA CLE Legal Studies Externship Program has worked with more than 200 law student interns coming from more than 20 countries worldwide. Supervision and placement has occured in Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia, Laos and Viet Nam, with an additional online virtual internship program conducted between BABSEA CLE and university in Australia. The program has also placed interns, or collaborative, with more than 25 access to justice related organizations and institutions throughout the region. The program emphasizes a number of key areas related to both helping others to achieve access to justice and personal social justice development. They include: community legal education, research, curriculum development, community service, cross-cultural collaboration, and self-reflection. During the approximate 12-week experience, activities include a variety of community based legal education teachings, service projects with local & rural communities and many educational events & cultural experiences. The interns will be given the opportunity to work and interact with the BABSEA CLE international community legal education team as well as local lawyers, legal educators and community organizations in the Southeast Asia region. |
| Externship Supervisors | The primary coordination of the overall Legal Studies International Externship Clinic will be supervised by USA lawyer Bruce A. Lasky who is also BABSEA CLE’s Community Legal Education Initiative Director. He has been been involved in access to justice and legal aid initiatives for more than 20 years and is a former public defender/criminal legal aid lawyer. Currently he is working as the International Team Leader on a United Nations Clinical Legal Education Project in Vietnam. He has worked as an Adjunct or Visiting Professor/Senior Law Lecturer with universities in Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia, Viet Nam and Australia. Interns will also be supervised by BABSEA CLE Director Wendy Morrish who is BABSEA CLE’s Regional CLE Coordinator.Licensed lawyers and law graduates from the region and internationally will also assist with supervision.Additionally, BABSEA CLE Volunteer Coordinators will assist the overall process including preparing the Orientation materials, creating a schedule for the externs and coordinating the projects. Volunteer Coordinators will provide some assistance with issues related to daily living issues but interns are expected to be pro-active and relatively self-sufficient in this area. |
| What does the International Externship Involve?* | The International Externship Clinic program was designed by BABSEA CLE volunteers, partners and other volunteers to address many access to justice issues related to legal education and community empowerment. It focuses on developing materials and teaching the law in a variety of methods to make the justice system accessible for all. In particular, most BABSEA CLE interns participate in a variety of Community Legal Education activities including University Based Clinical Legal Education programs and working with grassroots organizations. These CLE programs and grassroots organizations focus on delivering community legal education/empowerment to the communities in which they work.Our legal interns play an integral role in facilitating CLE programs for a variety of audiences in their respective countries. During the externship program, participants will have a number of opportunities to work with community-based legal education (CLE) programs interacting with the local people and the legal issues faced in the Southeast Asia region. The interns will focus on a variety of legal issues and projects during their time in Southeast Asia. Specific projects often change from year to year but looking at what previous interns have worked on provides an idea of the possible type of projects interns may be working on during their participation in the program.Many of these projects have often focused on: access to justice and legal aid initiatives, the professional practice training of law students and lawyers, migrant worker rights, pro-bono lawyering, equitable development, housing rights, land law, prisoner rights, juvenile justice, equal access to healthcare, HIV/drug use laws, children legal rights, family law, statelessness and citizenship, human trafficking, environmental issues, criminal law and procedure, conference, workshop and fundraising event planning, proposal and report writing, developing financial budgets, CLE English teaching, and legal education manual and curriculum development. Projects and focus areas are often determined on country and/or organization placement of interns.Interns placed with partner organizations are still considered working as interns for BABSEA CLE but are seconded to partner organizations. They will split their work time and also work on a variety of BABSEA CLE projects and do so remotely. In addition to being responsible to the host partner organization, such interns will remain responsible to follow the policies and guidelines of BABSEA CLE.Interns will be engaged in a variety of tasks which will likely include legal research, reading curriculum for substance as well as proofreading/formatting lesson plans, helping to create and revise lesson plans with the BABSEA CLE and CLE university teams, joining our teams to assist and monitor provincial trainings, evaluating curriculum through the trainings themselves, developing and evaluating CLE English curriculum through the trainings themselves and synthesizing the participants’ evaluations and evaluating through direct observations in order to improve and revise curriculum. The interns will also be writing a small group legal research article on a relevant legal area that BABSEA CLE focuses on. These tasks will all be done in a supportive and progressive atmosphere that is committed to nurturing public service, developing the capacity of local communities, as well as promoting social justice in the Southeast Asia region.
Through their collaborative externship contribution, interns gain and in-depth knowledge about BABSEA CLE and our partners, the areas we work in, our projects and issues (both legal and non-legal related). The interns are directly involved with our projects and issues helping them understand the legal work they are doing and the reasons and need for doing it. For many interns this participation directly leads to a transformative experience for them on the way they view on what is law and the way law and society intersect. *Please note that it is not common for interns to directly work on active, individual legal cases |
| Community/Clinical Legal Education (CLE) | BABSEA CLE recognizes that educating individuals about their rights empowers them to take full advantage of the legal system where they live. Often, problems arise from a lack of awareness regarding what people are entitled to under the law. Throughout the region, marginalized groups and individuals yearn for justice, yet they often find themselves without the power or ability to find it.BABSEA CLE also recognizes that it is imperative to help develop and train the current and next generation of legal advocates within the Southeast Asia region to support access to justice programs and pro-bono initiatives for the poor, disadvantaged and marginalized. |
| Direct Community Service | To encourage the volunteer ethic and the effectiveness of service learning as well as keeping the interns focused on access to justice issues, each intern will need to maintain a volunteer log and will be responsible for completing 50 hours of additional volunteer work with BABSEA CLE projects and with BABSEA CLE partners. The volunteer coordinator/country supervisor will sign off on the hours after completion. Legal interns will also be encouraged to take weekend trips and volunteer with local law students or legal trainers to teach with some of our partner organizations. |
| Legal interns will be expected to: |
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