Community legal education and our duty to dream

Antonio M. Coronado, Cayley Balser, Gabriela Elizondo-Craig, Shannon S. Hayes, Abigael McGuire and Marisol Rodriguez-Cruz

Chapter 8 in Research Handbook on Global Legal Education, 2026, pp 140-155 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Across the United States and with few exceptions, the practice of law is regulated through strict state unauthorized practice of law (UPL) rules and a requirement of formal legal education. In recent years, the relaxing of UPL rules and corresponding expansion of training for new categories of legal professionals pose a novel question: will new programs of legal learning take on the historic harms of the law school as their antecedent? As individuals involved in one such program, we come to this piece across jurisdictions and relationships with legal power to explore how we might practice repair in US legal education. Drawing on prior scholarship regarding reparative legal pedagogies, we make the case that democratizing legal knowledge is one node in the broader project of promoting truth and healing within legal education as a formal system. This piece proceeds in three sections, weaving the stories of our co-authors as community legal writers: Section 1 discusses how we might atone for the US law schools’ lasting legacy of exclusion; Section 2 imagines how we might re-ground the law school in a new vision for reparative legal learning; and Section 3 centers individuals closest to both the harms and transformative futures of US legal education, with reflections from current Justice Workers, or community advocates who are authorized to provide certain forms of legal help. Our hope, in identifying justice work as repair work, is to reflect on how one manifestation of community legal education invites us all to dream.

Keywords: Community Legal Education; Justice Work; Legal Empowerment; Unauthorized Practice of Law; Trauma-Informed Pedagogy; Reparative Legal Pedagogies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781788117005
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