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The “Right Paper”: Developing Legal Literacy in a Legal Self-Help Clinic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Alyse Bertenthal
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Abstract

Legal self-help is the fastest-growing segment of legal services in the United States, and a significant addition to the repertoire of programs aimed at opening up access to justice in the civil legal system. Few studies, however, have examined how such services work in practice. Through ethnographic research and analysis of meetings between unrepresented litigants and attorneys offering advice in a legal self-help clinic, this article expands the empirical investigation of access to justice to consider what legal self-help looks like in actual practice. In this article, I follow the concept of the “right paper” to analyze the process through which legal self-help litigants develop legal literacy, including the role of lawyers in helping them to do so. The article concludes by discussing what such practices reveal about recent efforts to open up access to justice and also about the dynamics through which people come to think about law and, especially, how to use it.

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Articles
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 42 , Issue 4 , Fall 2017 , pp. 963 - 989
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 2017 

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