One thing that people have worried about when they consider public legal education is that it will cause people to realize they have legal issues that nobody’s available to help with. In fact, I was worrying about that just the other day. In the past and still today, even legal aid organizations oppose community legal education in some cases because of the fear that it will end up over-overtaxing the already overtaxed and tiny number of poverty lawyers our society has on hand. As one fellow nicely described the more general problem of legal service begetting legal need begetting legal service, “paradoxically, the more lawyers served the poor the more the legal needs of the poor would grow. This would in turn trigger an increased demand for the services of the attorneys.” And what happens when there aren’t enough lawyers to handle all the cases? Legal aid turns to community legal education. Yikes, what a spiral!

Plus, legal services—and PLE in particular—have a way of manufacturing legal needs out of thin air and bailing wire, by empowering people to think differently. The late sociologist Leon Mayhew, for instance, once told of a 1967 survey that found that less than 1% of Detroit women said they’d ever experienced gender discrimination. Mayhew suggested that

If the respondents had applied a higher level of legal and sociological imagination to the question, a much greater proportion could have truthfully answered in the affirmative, but the necessary attitudes and information for seeing such discrimination were relatively undeveloped. Nor were there any well developed channels for routing cases of such discrimination to the attention of attorneys and legal agencies.

Awareness that you’ve got a legal issue, though, doesn’t have to be the endpoint of public legal education. PLE that just tells you that you need a lawyer could indeed cause a big mess.