Speaking of Justice: Encounters in a Legal Self-Help Clinic

Abstract

This article explores a new form of legal aid commonly referred to as "legal self-help." Through ethnographic research in a legal self-help clinic, I examine the techniques through which help legal self-help is produced, sustained, and sometimes even challenged as a means of better understanding and critiquing the reformist ideal of "access to justice." In exploring this new context for the negotiation of legal disputes, I show how the shift from legal help to legal self-help blurs the boundaries between professional and lay people, between procedure and substance, and between rules and relationships. By tracking the discursive movement across and through these categories, I explore the logic of legal self help as a form of access to law and the legal process. [access to justice, law and language, legal expertise, legal self-help].

Keywords: "legal self-help", “access to justice”, negotiation