Access to justice and legal empowerment interventions can be crucial for states to combat violence and poverty and for ordinary people to address a range of socioeconomic challenges. This project will explore the rise of the community paralegal model as a means of increasing access to justice and legal empowerment. As this study will examine successful donor-civil society legal empowerment partnerships, it will be relevant to scholars and policymakers interested in how site-specific legal knowledge is created and the politics of how the community paralegal model are put into practice.
This research will employ historical and archival research of primary and secondary sources to trace the creation of community paralegal organizations, their organizational histories and features, and changes to the legal and political frameworks in which they operate. Interviews and participant observation will be conducted with community paralegals, authorities, and stakeholders. This project will examine the political, historical, and social context of paralegal work, how paralegals reshape understandings of law, and how that paralegal work reverberates throughout relevant policy arenas over time.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
