The government itself is the biggest provider of public legal education, at least in modern first-world democracies. And when I tell people in the United States about my interest in PLE, they often think I’m talking about the drab brochures that various state and federal agencies produce. Things like these pamphlets on landlord and tenant law, open meetings, and victims’ rights from the Idaho Attorney General’s office. Those are PLE, no doubt. But they and their kind are not going to do the job.

The problem with “government PLE” is that, like government cheese, its purpose is to quell the turmoil that would come if the people had nothing at all. It’s there, in many cases, so that the people won’t bug the bureaucrats. Although I know there are examples to the contrary, and that some of the people who produce government PLE are admirable and creative public servants, political realities loom around all of this work. And political realities force neutrality and caution.

Neutrality would be fine except that in PLE you can’t be neutral—the law is a moving train. And while you could say that it’s the state’s role to promote an unimpeded course for the “law train,” that would ignore that our laws are carefully counterbalanced pairs of rights and responsibilities. Explaining a law neutrally is like explaining a gun by describing its physical characteristics: you’ve missed the point. Indeed, in law school you’ll hear laws get called “swords” or “shields” depending on how they’re used in a given situation. A neutral description of a law is appropriate only in the purest academic setting; and the PLE setting is the absolute opposite.

Caution would be fine except that to educate you can’t be cautious. Education requires stimulation, and caution is not stimulating. To even reach people in the first place you have to have a hook, and any good hook is built out of surprise or controversy. Government knows this, and when it does undertake to educate—about the effects of drugs, for example, or even the law—it’s comfortable being hookish and unreserved. But, again, political realities mean there will always be legal possibilities that worry whole swaths of the population. And there will be others that could cause nothing but headaches for the government to process. If these get explained by the state at all, it might be in plain text in a footnote on page 43 of an obscure, limited-run pamphlet.

Independent PLE, though plagued with some of the same difficulties due to funding realities, can take risks that government can’t. It can be biased, and so can breath life and relevance into the law. It can be reckless, and so can attract the attention of those it has to reach. And though I’m hardly saying here that government should not be doing PLE (it should be doing more, actually), we all need to remember that government carries baggage that independent organizations do not.