Clinical Legal Education at the Crossroads of Sustainability and Social Justice: The Experience of the Milan Criminal Law Clinic

The Criminal Law Clinic of the University of Milan directed by Professor Angela Della Bella goes further than the traditional goal of providing students with practice-oriented legal education. Its mission explicitly embraces the social dimension of law, aiming to foster awareness of social justice issues while generating a tangible and sustainable impact in the contexts in which it operates. The Clinic offers students the opportunity to deal with real cases through direct contact with practitioners and all the actors involved in criminal trials, by developing defence strategies, conducting research, and drafting the necessary documents. In this way students are engaged in a highly effective learning experience, aimed at sensitizing future lawyers to issues of social justice and empowering them. A distinctive feature of the Clinic lies in its simultaneous involvement in a plurality of different projects, which allows, throughout the course, the sharing and comparison of experiences among groups of students working on diverse issues. Our activities are organized along two main lines. The first concerns the prison of San Vittore in Milan, where the Clinic has established a legal help desk for foreign detainees. This initiative addresses structural barriers that disproportionately affect foreign prisoners and often function as discriminatory factors within the legal and social framework. By facilitating access to legal information, particularly in relation to issues of “Crimmigration”, the project promotes social sustainability by strengthening rights protection in a highly vulnerable context and by fostering more equitable institutional practices. The second line of activity involves collaboration with practicing lawyers and judicial actors on selected cases of particular social relevance, developing sustainability as a longer-term academic and institutional impact. Through this cooperation, students engage with real litigation concerning social justice, while legal practitioners are prompted to strategic reflection on systemic problems. In the past, clinical cases have led to broader scholarly reflection on immigration detention centres (CPR) and on the protection of health in such settings. More recently, the Clinic’s focus has expanded to two emerging areas: abuse by police staff in prisons, exacerbated by the chronic overcrowding of the Italian penitentiary system; and State responsibility for delay of rescue during migrant shipwreck off the coast of Italy. The panel aims to present and critically assess the impact of these activities on students, beneficiaries, and institutions, highlighting how clinical legal education can function as a sustainable model for integrating teaching, social justice, and legal reform.