Occupational therapy and early advice in prisons: Trans-disciplinarity and inter-disciplinarity in clinical legal education
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7190/jostle.v1i1.617Keywords:
Occupational therapy, access to justice, prisons, clinical legal education, trans-disciplinarityAbstract
Clinical legal education is now widespread across the Higher Education Sector and is a key means by which law students supplement or move beyond traditional forms of legal education. Where it involves real-world projects, it is a means of enfranchising those who cannot otherwise afford to instruct a lawyer. This may be in the form of individualised legal advice and has (more recently) sought to encompass forms of collective advocacy (Bernheim et al., 2025). Universities are also epicentres within society of knowledge construction. There are multiple examples of transdisciplinary projects across the world, in clinical legal education settings (Bozin et al., 2025). We seek to examine the viability of individualised, expert-informed advice to imprisoned persons seeking advice on social care in England & Wales. This collaboration between a prisoner rights solicitor in Hallam Legal Advice Centre and a Senior Lecturer in Occupational Therapy, enables urgent focus on (1) the unsustainability of the legal advice sector, (2) disparities in power on the prison estate, (3) universities demonstrating their impact on society, and (4) evaluations of student successes. It is an experiment in collaboration that will, at the very least, expand dialogues between departments at universities across the world, on advice-based problem-solving. Problems, as Dr. Ulf-Daniel Ehlers has said, do not think about disciplines. They are therefore always interdisciplinary (Ehlers & Eigbrecht, 2024).
References
Bernheim, E., Namian, D., Lambert, S., Thibault, A., & Fortin-Boileau, P. (2025). Collective advocacy in the age of neoliberalism: Getting political in an interdisciplinary law clinic. International Journal of Clinical Legal Education, 32(2), 20-36. https://doi.org/10.19164/ijcle.v32i1.1653
Bozin, D., Ballard, A.J., de Prazer, V., & Weekes, J. (2025). Thinking outside the disciplinary box: building better lawyers to solve wicked problems. International Journal of Clinical Legal Education, 32(1), 3-20. https://doi.org/10.19164/ijcle.v32i1.1654
Ehlers, U-D. & Eigbrecht, L. (2024). Creating the university of the future. Springer VS Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-42948-5
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