Traveller Equality and Justice Project Team, School of Law celebrate success at the UCC Teaching Excellence Awards

12 Dec 2022

The Traveller Equality & Justice Project (TEJP) a partnership between UCC Law and the Free Legal Advice Centre, operates the ‘TEJP Clinic’ providing information and representation to Travellers who have experienced discrimination in accessing goods and services in Cork and Kerry. 

UCC School of Law is delighted to announce that members of our faculty have achieved success at the university’s Teaching Excellence Awards. 

The Teaching Excellence Awards recognise the outstanding efforts of teaching staff to ensure that UCC students receive the highest quality learning and teaching experience.  This year's awards were held in the Aula Maxima on December 7th. 

The Traveller Equality and Justice Project (TEJP) recieved the President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching – Team Award. 

The TEJP Clinic is overseen by TEJP staff Dr. Fiona Donson, Dr. Samantha Morgan-Williams, Alannah Humphreys and is an innovative example of how clinical legal education and pedagogy can enhance graduate attributes, providing students with discipline-specific skill-development, while meeting the broader needs of UCC’s community through both research and learning outputs.

Funded by an EU Rights Equality & Citizenship Award 2021- 2023, the TEJP provides vital access to justice for Travellers in Cork & Kerry and is an embedded community partnership organisation with Traveller rights-groups in the region. 

The TEJP Clinic is an elective clinical module for BCL students, taking 15 students per academic year. Students have two hours of contact time a week for the full academic year (September-March), alongside independent study and occasional group work (ca. 12 hours a semester).

Established in October 2021, the first two years of student involvement with the Clinic have been vital in informing module formalisation for September 2023. This Clinic development is conscious of two core challenging elements – meeting social justice needs and developing a ‘live client’ approach to clinical level education in Ireland.

Students are required to take prejudice and anti-bias training and are immersed into the legislative framework (the Equal Status Act 2000-2018). Students engage with Traveller litigants and experienced practicioners to gain understanding of the challenges and obstacles experienced by the Traveller Community to understand the lived-experience perspective, further enriching their understanding of not only how the legal system works, but how minority victims of discrimination experience it. Students support TEJP Clinic staff with live cases, allowing them to follow a case from initial referral through to the adjudication body. 

Travellers’ experience extremely high-levels of discrimination in accessing all services, including legal representation, this compounds their entrenched marginalisation and exclusion. Notwithstanding this, there is no appropriate law centre providing representation and advice in such matters accessible to Travellers outside of Dublin. The TEJP Clinic, as a Traveller-specific live-client clinic, provides legal information and supports to Traveller victims of discrimination within Cork & Kerry, responding directly to the aforementioned ‘unmet legal need’[v] . The TEJP Clinic, and the valuable work of our students, fills this gap by providing legal information to Travellers and to embedding social justice/equality litigation within formal legal education

The TEJPs novel partnership with FLAC provides the opportunity to run our live-client legal clinic supporting Traveller Community clients based within Law UCC, facilitating a clinical education model which allows students to learn how to perform like social justice lawyers through casework and associated tasks. Our students welcome the opportunity to undertake this work and this is reflected in our 100% positive module feedback, where students reflect on limited options available within the BCL curriculum and the value of their Clinic roles and outputs, many further recognising the impact which TEJP Clinic has had on them as future legal professionals.