Legal and Literacy

The Legal Literacy Initiative takes people where they are – in laundromats, churches, housing estates, seniors` centres and flea markets – with the digital skills and legal resources they need most. The Legal Literacy Initiative brings together libraries and legal aid organizations and uses new tools such as Aprendi.org to provide relevant, easy-to-use databases of legal information and resources. In Washington, LWF US, funded by the DC Mayor`s Office on Asian and Pacific Island Affairs, partnered with the Asian Pacific American Legal Resource Center (APALRC) and the Multicultural Community Service (MCS) to reimagine how low-income, English-limited (LEP) Asian/Pacific Islander (LEP) immigrants in DC access and receive legal information and advice. Traditional models of promoting legal awareness and competence have generally been boring, difficult to use, and have not been used preventively. It was provided through lectures and workshops, intensive programmes, short courses, books, posters, brochures and materials distributed mainly by governmental organizations. “Today, you can`t access basic legal information if you don`t have internet, computers or basic digital skills. The Legal Literacy Initiative is the link that allows residents to access information, answer questions themselves, and determine if and how they want legal help. In a communication to 67. UN Secretary-General of the UN General Assembly session states: “The deprivations faced by people living in poverty throughout their lives – lack of access to quality education, limited access to information, limited political voice and social capital – lead to lower levels of legal competence and awareness of their rights and create social barriers to seeking redress. [29] Legal literacy can enable people to demand justice, accountability and effective redress.

Legal issues always have the potential to become a crisis when ignorance prevents someone from anticipating legal problems and receiving timely information or advice. Crises unnecessarily amplify the impact on a person`s life. On the lesser importance of legal competence in legal education in the United States, Leonard J. Long, Professor of Law, Quinnipiac University School of Law: “Law students, law firms, consumers of legal services, and society as a whole would benefit from a legal profession composed of people familiar with American law, its history and jurisprudence. However, legal competence is not encouraged primarily because it is not considered necessary for the practice of law. At one end of its spectrum of meanings, for example, “legal literacy” means full competence in legal discourse, both as a reader and as an author. This type of literacy is vocational training and requires not only formal schooling but also years of practice. Indeed, as is the case with other authentic languages, the ideal of perfect competence in legal language can never be achieved; The practitioner is always learning about his language and the world, he does both over and over again in a certain way, and these processes never end.