I’ve posted about government public legal education (PLE) programs (”govPLE,” which can be too cautious, to the point of being unhelpful). And I’ve written, indirectly, about bar PLE when I posted about pro bono (although there’s more to say on “barPLE,” and I’ll get to that in the coming weeks). For now, though, here’s a little piece on PLE that hurts; that is, how a little information can be a bad thing.

I recently learned about a community legal education campaign for Arab and Muslim Americans that a major civil rights organization mounted several years ago. The campaign, a “know your rights” effort, involved materials and workshops that encouraged individuals in these communities to steadfastly assert their rights to police and other authorities. The civil rights group, however, was not prepared to offer legal support to most of those who followed its advice and ended up arrested or harassed for standing on their rights. The result was frustration and increased danger for the minority community; public legal education had led the community into a raw conflict with police.

Some PLE organizations in Canada recognize that education and information can hurt rather help when it’s limited or not backed up by professional, emergency legal services. These groups will think twice about producing PLE for audiences or on topics where there is little hope for people to get free legal help or remedy problems on their own. Some will refuse to do any PLE at all in those areas.

This attitude can go a long way to avoiding frustration and even serious harm. But it also means that latent legal needs stay latent. Those latent needs are then left to private attorneys, funders, state access to justice commissions, and governments to identify on their own, but there’s a decent chance that those groups too will remain ignorant of them.

What role does community legal education have in simply cultivating legal needs—in building community recognition of rights that might ultimately require the attention of better-funded and more politically powerful champions? And, whatever role community legal education has in that, when should it ethically back off in order to prevent the hurt that can come from knowing just a little, but not enough?