Access to Justice and Legal Clinics: Developing a Reflective Lawyering Space Some Insights from the Italian Experience

Abstract

As stated in the introduction to this special issue, the right to access to justice is critical in a liberal state: it allows individuals to defend their interests in court and to achieve full inclusion in the political community. Nonetheless, epistemological, class, and market inequalities have historically hindered its realization. Worldwide, poor and marginalized individuals and groups do not have access to the tools they need to effectively access the judicial system. Modern liberal democracies have developed two main approaches to ensure better access to justice. The first approach focuses on providing legal services to those unable to afford a lawyer, and is identified as the “legal aid solution.”1 The second approach goes beyond the need for legal services of specific individuals, and aims to address the problem of legal representation of group and collective interests; this is identified as the “representation for diffuse interests solution.”2 Despite significant variations, the solutions that, according to each approach, have been