Community Lawyering or Collaborative Lawyering?

Abstract

Community lawyering and collaborative lawyering are two of the most widely used human rights advocacy tactics by North American law school clinics. However, existing literature shows that neither of these two tactics alone can effectively materialize the empowerment of the concerned underprivileged and marginalized communities. While community lawyering does focus on building leadership in close connection with the community, without collaborative lawyering the leadership can become stagnant in time. Similarly, while collaborative lawyering equitably shares the decision-making powers with the community, it does not specifically focus on building sustainable leadership within the community. Hence, by way of analyzing an ongoing clinical project of International Human Rights Clinical Project at Harvard Law School, I argue that a balanced amalgamation of both the advocacy strategies can produce the best result—effective community leaders with experienced partners to fight for their rights and provide for a more effective clinical pedagogical method for students. Due to the diverse nature of human rights advocacy tactics, this article focuses only on economic, social and cultural rights advocacy.