I’m known to lament that there’s not enough grassroots community legal education going on in the U.S. And I mean both in quantity and in character. The “quantity” complaint is a standard one: even though there are many, many groups providing public legal education to youth and adults in America, there are just not yet enough to meet even critical needs. But the “character” complaint is polemical. I suspect that the pamphlets, lectures, and websites that are the usual stock of “sideproject PLE” (my term for community legal education efforts by groups who see their principal mission as something else) are troublesomely ineffective. And my work in Canada is confirming that.

What I do here in Canada is look all over the nation, and all through 35 years of Canadian history, to find truly effective ways of empowering people and their communities by educating them about the law. During many evenings and weekends, I try to do the same for the USA. Sadly, I only have a big federal grant for the former work; but I’ve been doing the latter in my spare time for a couple years now, so maybe it all evens out. As I highlight key programs in Canada over at my more formal blog, I’m going to make an effort to highlight some US efforts on this one.

* * * * *

I’ll start with the law collective. Today, most law collectives are groups of radical nonlawyer activists who assemble as a consensus, nonhierarchical body to provide legal training and support to other activists, mainly those who are using tactics like protest, civil disobedience, and monkeywrenching. In the 1970s, bands of lawyers, paralegals, and activists did roughly the same thing and often called themselves “law collectives,” too (but also “law communes,” “community law firms,” and—my favorite—the “Bar Sinister” in LA). Back then, law collectives supported the anti-(Vietnam)-war movement; now they’re found within the antiglobalization movement. As to what happened to law collectives between the 1970s and today, I’ve only been able to learn three things: (1) some collapsed in the mid-eighties amid funding and morale problems; (2) some evolved into leftist law firms, such as the People’s Law Office on North Milwaukee in Chicago; and (3) radical circles grew paranoid of espionage and sensitive to intra-group power imbalances, and lawyers lost their welcome as insiders.

Grassroots community legal education has been a core component of American law collectives’ work, both in the 70s and today. More significantly, they’ve used legal education as a revolutionary strategy for community/movement empowerment. Paul Harris, co-founder of the San Francisco Community Law Collective (1970–1986) and later president of the National Lawyers Guild, described the law collective critique:

Lawyers play the role of priests, translating experience into legal dogma instead of piercing the legal mystique. The lawyer, like the priest, suffers the initiation rights of his calling, wears its vestments, legitimizes its authority, speaks its language, partakes of its rituals, and maintains a monopoly over its mystery. . . . The formation of a collective in itself was a message to the client that lawyers were people, . . . and that the law was a tool to be used, not a mysterious force to be feared or idealized.

Today’s law collectives, although now almost exclusively nonlawyer organizations, have pretty much the same idea. Here’s how the Oakland-based Midnight Special Law Collective thinks of itself:

By sharing information and refusing to allow the legal system to separate and silence us, we become wrenches in the wheels of the machine. Also, as activists demystifying the law we shatter the accepted limitations on learning - we assert everyone’s right to access and everyone’s ability to understand the law.

And these collectives are not all talk. They are developing creative, responsive ways to help people understand the law and use it to help themselves. Programs like street theater, know your rights comic books, and one-on-one, on-the-street legal training are all promising ideas that more conventional U.S. groups aren’t doing much of. From my one experience helping with a modern law collective, and from what I know otherwise, most of this work ends up helping the rich white dropout activist set (see this list of trainings, for instance), but I think that’s largely because those happen to be the human resources of the antiglobalization movement.

Yet, even though today’s law collectives are all-volunteer efforts sustained by and for what’s kind of a big social scene with a political agenda, some of the community legal education methods these groups use are worth paying attention to. They can translate from the privileged social activism setting to work in poor communities and with the general population. Coordination efforts, including those of Legal Services Corporation grantees and state access to justice committees, should not ignore these groups. They are, as their work makes clear, partners in the cause.