Anna Copeland

Asylum seekers who arrived in Australia by boat between 2012 and 2013 have been the subject of numerous negative changes in policy and law. These have covered issues such as denial of work rights, changes to rights in review, restrictions on funded legal assistance and access to interpreters. Most recently, they have been forced through a ‘fast track’ process, pressuring them into an expedited and complex system with no funded legal assistance. This chapter presents research on the impact this process had on the mental health of the fast-track applicants and those who have stepped in to assist them. It also considers whether this context is an appropriate setting for clinical legal teaching. Should students be protected from areas that are highly politicised and traumatic or is exposure to law’s injustice an important part of legal education?

This article examines the use of solitary confinement of juveniles within the Western Australian justice system. Examining the legal framework, it points to the issues of inadequate accountability and oversight. Often manifesting itself under different names such as regression or simply confinement, it still results in extended periods of social isolation, minimal environmental stimulation and minimal opportunity for social interaction. The negative consequences of such confinement on children and young people are briefly examined before it is considered within the international human rights framework, specifically, in light of Australia's international obligations and their stated commitment to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Beijing Rules and Havana Guidelines.

Clinical legal education (CLE) is potentially the major disruptor of traditional law schools’ core functions. Good CLE challenges many central clichés of conventional learning in law—everything from case book method to the 50-minute lecture. And it can challenge a contemporary overemphasis on screen-based learning, particularly when those screens only provide information and require no interaction. Australian Clinical Legal Education comes out of a thorough research program and offers the essential guidebook for anyone seeking to design and redesign accountable legal education; that is, education that does not just transform the learner, but also inculcates in future lawyers a compassion for and service of those whom the law ought to serve. Established law teachers will come to grips with the power of clinical method. Law students struggling with overly dry conceptual content will experience the connections between skills, the law and real life. Regulators will look again at law curricula and ask law deans ‘when’?

Why do we need to distinguish between young people and children? Does the law make such a distinction and does it stick to it? The focus of this chapter is on the circumstances and conditions that serve to distinguish the young person as a particular focus of legal attention and the ways in which the legal system governs young people. The legal status of young people, and the lawfulness of activities they engage in, depends upon how the legal system conceptualises, and in turn categorises, 'young people'. We argue that young people. occupy an awkward social and legal space, in which they can variously. be characterised as children and in need of legal protection or as adults with legal responsibilities. By contrast, legal and non-legal understandings of what it is to be a child, and the child's place within the legal system, are not quite so ambiguous. In the last 20 or so years there has been a theoretical reorientation in sociological and psychological research towards examining the 'perspective of children ... as subjects who construct their own consciousness and life trajectories' rather than being understood through a prism of social and psychological dependency.l Despite this trend in the 'psy' sciences, children are still generally thought of as socially and physically immature. As a result, they are extended a certain legal, as well as social, indulgence. The flip-side of our adult obligation to protect and nurture children is their exemption from the legal and social responsibilities of adulthood.

This article examines participatory rights as human rights and considers their importance to the lives of children and young people. It argues that a broad definition of participation needs to be used which takes us from 'round tables' to understanding that young people participate in many different ways. It points out that failure to recognise and respect the many varied ways that children and young people choose to participate results in a breach of their human rights. It shows how our socio-legal system operates to permit and support these breaches of the rights of children and young people, resulting in their alienation from civic society.

This paper seeks to examine the legality of young people being moved on from spaces that are a mix of private and public. Every day, young people, youth workers and security guards grapple with this issue; this is hardly surprising as the legal position is complex and unclear. It is an area that engages both civil and criminal law, but with little indication where one might end and the other start. It is also an area of law that struggles with the differences between public and private property, with little or no acknowledgment that these particular spaces may have the characteristics of both.

Clinical legal education programs, where students work on real cases for credit towards their degree, have been around in Australia for three almost three decades.[1] Community legal centres are providing rich learning environments for many of these clinical programs. From the first clinic within a community legal centre established by Monash University at Springvale Community Legal Centre, to the most recent established by Deakin University at Geelong Community Legal Centre, many community legal centres and clinics have found benefits from their collaboration.