Descrizione

Legal clinics are a new teaching tool in Italy that is becoming a common feature of bachelor degree programmes in law. There is no shortage of dogmatic insights exploring their extra-European roots and the adaptation of their models to the national context, highlighting the role of clinics in the construction of critical legal knowledge and in promoting rights, or identifying connections with commons theory. Still, over the years, Italian scientific literature has focused predominantly on a logic of circulating experiential knowledge regarding the content and methodologies used. In recent years, with the growing recognition of universities’ social responsibility and ministerial evaluation mechanisms of educational institutions, there has been growing interest in examining clinical experience as a unique form of expressing universities’so-called “third mission”. In this framework, this work stands out for its unique and highly useful focus, in that it seeks to reconstruct the phenomenon of legal clinics from a gnoseological angle, by searching for bases within the most highly consecrated principles and values in the Italian Constitution. While teaching freedom, including in universities, referred to in Article 33 of the Italian Constitution may undoubtedly represent a milestone for the birth and progressive development of legal clinics in Italy, the constitutional perspective reveals other and even more significant links. (taken from the foreword by Laura Scomparin)