A tribute to Louise McKinney.

• Author: Geraghty, Thomas F.
• Position: Case Western Reserve University School of Law professor - Testimonial

I first met Louise McKinney in 1996 in Ethiopia. We worked together on a project funded by the American Bar Association's Africa Law Initiative and designed to provide information about clinical legal education to East African leaders in legal education. During our month-long stay in Ethiopia, we consulted with deans, law professors, and lawyers from Ethiopia and East Africa. The culmination of the project was a five-day conference on clinical legal education held in Addis Ababa. Attendees included the leading legal educators from Addis Ababa University, the University of Nairobi and Moi University in Kenya, the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, and Makerre University in Uganda. Clinical faculty from the United States in attendance included Peggy Maisel, Elizabeth Gunning, Homer La Rue, and Douglas Frankel. The objective of this conference was to impart useful information regarding clinical education to African legal educators. The challenges were to share, to listen, and to collaborate with our African colleagues in ways that would respond to the needs of African law students, faculty, and the legal community.

All involved in the conference would agree that Louise was our leader. She had served as Director of the Clinical Education Programme at the University of Botswana before joining the faculty at Case Western Reserve University School of Law in 1989, and thus had first-hand experience with the development and administration of a clinical program in Africa. Her background as a legal services lawyer for the Legal Aid Society of Cleveland, her excellence as a clinical teacher, and her demonstrated commitment to social justice in her work in Africa and the United States made her the perfect person to be our leader at the conference in Addis. Louise's final report to the American Bar Association on the status of clinical education in Ethiopia was a model of precision as it described the then-existing system of legal education in Ethiopia.

Louise's report also accurately identified the challenges facing implementation of clinical programs in 1996 in Ethiopia (which then had only three law schools graduating 60 students per year; now Ethiopia has twenty law schools and over 1,500 graduates per year). The issues that she identified persist to this day and will be familiar to those involved in the establishment of clinical programs in the United States. Among the challenges Louise cited in her report were lack of resources to support...