Legal Empowerment and Access to Justice
Stephen Golub has had a huge influence on modern thinking about legal empowerment and access to justice. The Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor noted that his thinking about the need to provide the poor with concrete mechanisms to claim their rights and alleviate their poverty made him one of the ‘founding scholars’ in legal empowerment thinking.
What’s Happened to Capacity Building?
Among other things, this thinking has led to increasing scepticism about the effectiveness of ‘institutional capacity building’ and calls for me serious attention to access to justice. If you don’t know Professor Golub’s work, check out his influential study from 2003: Beyond the Rule of Law Orthodoxy – The Legal Empowerment Alternative: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Have a look as well at the articles he edited in Legal Empowerment: Practitioners Perspectives, IDLO 2010.
Justice For All
Professor Golub contributed a working paper to the Task Force on Justice, Justice for All (2019) report and his influence is to be found throughout their work.
We encourage justice seekers to seek out his work.
