Decentering law through public legal education

Public legal education (PLE) has received renewed attention in the context of deregulation and recent cuts to publicly funded legal assistance in the UK. However, while PLE practices can support access to justice and supplement provision, they also risk placing the burden of responsibility for coping with legal problems on those most in need of support. In this paper we will argue this tension plays on a false dichotomy between education and advice, one that we suggest arises partly as a consequence of the discourse of legal need, in which law can come to seem like the best or the only way of framing social relations. However PLE works an important ‘boundary of law’: the division between who can know, speak about and access the law, and who cannot. As such, we argue that it can critically ‘decenter’ the law and expose law’s political contingency

Pedagogies of justice : critical approaches to public legal education

Public legal education is generally understood as a set of informal educational practices aimed at improving access to justice and social cohesion that predominantly focus on marginalised or disadvantaged populations. Public knowledge of law and its associated informational and educational practices provide a decisive locus for the legitimizing function of the normative ideal of the rule of law with its underpinning assumptions of security and stability. These ideals occlude a legacy of violence and political oppression that haunt the legal order, an erasure that is perpetuated when legal education is inattentive to its politicalphilosophical underpinnings. The pivotal role of public legal knowledge also carries the possibility of alternative critical engagements with justice systems that fundamentally interrogate the juridical-political order. This alternative possibility is explored in light of readings drawing from Critical Theorists of the Frankfurt School (Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer), through whom we encounter a reading of the problem of law as evidence of the violent founding (and preservation) of any political community. Their insight not only helps us to think differently about the inherent instability of the liberal legal order, but also suggests alternative pedagogical approaches attuned to the danger of the positivistic and technocratic rationalities of law. What these thinkers share, above all, is a lack of faith in progress in the advance of human civilization and modern institutions of justice. The refusal of a linear historicism of law (as process, trial or as tradition becoming law) also engages a negative utopianism that offers a way to think about public legal education as a form of counter-education. This opens a space of contestation with the presuppositions of law and legal orthodoxies, as community educators attempt to work with and against law. A sustained concern of the thesis is to reconceive the public’s ability to analyse and critically engage with law and the justice system as fundamental to the constitution of the body politic, and to explore the development of counter-hegemonic educational strategies