Disability Human Rights Clinics as a model for teaching Participatory International Human Rights lawyering

The Disability Human Rights Clinic (DHRC) was established at Melbourne Law School, the University of Melbourne, in 2015. Its supervisors and students conduct legislative and policy reform projects as well as strategic litigation. The DHRC was created by Anna Arstein-Kerslake to address a significant lack of resources in community-based organisations to undertake in-depth legal analysis. It uses an innovative model of clinical legal education to harness the skills of law students to fill that gap and to expose a new generation of lawyers to the emerging field of disability human rights law. In this article, we draw on our experiences running the DHRC to argue that the model it establishes can create significant scholarly output in the human rights field, direct engagement with the community, and rich doctrinal and experiential learning for students.