'Onati International Institute for the Sociology of Law'
Abstract
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
