About This Course

PILnet’s Pilot Course on Public Interest Lawyering for junior lawyers, recent law graduates, and representatives of NGOs in the Asia region is a channel for public interest-minded lawyers to gain experience and an international perspective on public interest law. The online course will consist of five interactive webinars with expert speakers and practical exercises that will encourage regional cooperation and development of creative ways to use the law for the public interest. This course will run from June 23-July 21.

Law school professors often tell incoming students that their job is to teach them to "think like lawyers." But by the time they leave law school, these students have usually only learned to think like a particular kind of lawyer--one that is ready to represent the interests of paying clients.

To represent the interests of society as a whole, in what is commonly called "justice," lawyers may need a different kind of thinking. To explore this idea, this course is built around five core concepts that we believe are critical to shaping the way public interest lawyers think.

These are:

• Access to Justice;
• Pro Bono Publico;
• Strategic Litigation;
• Legal Empowerment;
• and what we call New Directions in Public Interest Lawyering.

Access to Justice is a foundational concept for the way public interest lawyers think about their societies. This is because the problem of unmet legal needs means that law is not working for everyone and, as a result, that the legal systems may be treating some people unfairly or favoring the interests of some at the expense of others. Recognizing the problem is the first step for public interest lawyers in thinking of ways to address it.

A closely related concept is Pro Bono Publico, which calls to mind the responsibility of the legal profession in helping to address the unmet legal needs of society by acting for the public good. For the privilege of being able to practice law, all lawyers have a duty to help ensure that the legal system is not just serving the interests of paying clients. How far this duty goes and what it means in practice is viewed differently in various societies, and it is often in competition, or even conflict, with the commercial practice of law.

Because legal resources are often limited and legal aid insufficient, public interest lawyers have thought about ways to focus their efforts through the concept of Strategic Litigation. The idea is to select and litigate key cases that have the potential to effect change beyond the interests of a specific client. Perhaps because the express premise of this strategy is that some cases can have an impact that serves the public interest, it has become the best known form of public interest lawyering. But it is not the only or necessarily the best approach.

Another promising approach is Legal Empowerment, which addresses unmet legal needs by using alternative methods, like engaging paralegals. Unlike litigation, which seeks to remedy problems after the fact, legal empowerment seeks to anticipate future problems by providing timely targeted advice that can prevent or mitigate potential harm. Whether this approach can be used strategically to effect broader change is not yet well established.

Having examined these four key concepts that shape the way public interest lawyers think, the course concludes with a reexamination of the concept of Public Interest Lawyering by looking at some new directions that are now being explored. Informed by social science research and new capabilities afforded by technology, some public interest lawyers are finding innovative ways to think about addressing the unmet legal needs in their societies.

This course has the following objectives:

• Increase knowledge about the history, current practices, and applications of public interest lawyering to address unmet legal needs in society and contribute to broader social reforms.
• Enhance resources, tools, and skills that can be used by NGOs, clearinghouses, and pro bono/public interest lawyers to increase their knowledge, effectiveness, and resilience.
• Enable sharing of information, promotion of best practices, and collaboration among target audiences.