Legal awareness, sometimes called public legal education or legal literacy, is the empowerment of individuals regarding issues involving the law. Legal awareness helps to promote consciousness of legal culture, participation in the formation of laws and the rule of law.
Public legal education, sometimes called civics education, comprises a range of activities intended to build public awareness and skills related to law and the justice system. This term also refers to the fields of practice and study concerned with those activities, and to a social and professional movement that advocates greater societal commitment to educating people about the law. Anna-Marie Marshall explains that "in order to realize their rights, people need to take the initiative to articulate them. This initiative, in turn, depends on the availability and the relevance of legal schema to people confronting problems." This is because laws exist as part of a larger organizational ecosystem in which the interests of the organization as well as those of the actors become inextricably linked to the ways in which they are enacted.
Distinct from the education of students in law school seeking a degree in law (which is often simply called "legal education") and the continuing professional education of lawyers and judges (which is sometimes called "continuing legal education"), public legal education is principally aimed at people who are not lawyers, judges, or degree-seeking law students.
The term "public legal education" (PLE) is related to, and may encompass, several similar terms. The terms "public legal information" and "public legal education and information" (PLEI) emphasize a difference between educating and providing information. The term "community legal education" is common in Australia and the United States, where it often refers to community-based public legal education activities led by legal aid organizations. The term "law-related education" (LRE) usually refers to public legal education in primary and secondary schools (and sometimes in higher education), as opposed to PLE for adults and outside of school.
Definition of Legal awareness
According to the American Bar Association, Commission on Public Understanding, legal awareness is "the ability to make critical judgments about the substance of the law, the legal process, and available legal resources and to effectively utilize the legal system and articulate strategies to improve it is legal literacy".
The Canadian Bar Association (1992, 23) defines legal literacy as "the ability to understand words used in a legal context, to draw conclusions from them, and then to use those conclusions to take action."
With little change to the Multiple Action Research Group's (MARG, an NGO working for the promotion of legal awareness) definition, legal awareness can be defined as "critical knowledge of legal provisions and processes, coupled with the skills to use this knowledge to respect and realize rights and entitlements".
Thought, philosophy, and different approaches to legal literacy
The "continuum approach" considers legal literacy as "a capacity spread along a continuum, with lawyers and judges at one end and relatively incapable laypersons at the other". This approach was adopted by the legal scholar White who considered legal literacy to mean "that degree of competence in legal discourse required for meaningful and active life in our increasingly legalistic and litigious culture".
Author Bilder (1999) defines legal literacy as a "spectrum of functional skills", related to the conduct of litigation. The continuum approach explains, "a certain degree of legal literacy is required for effective participation in modern society, but it is not necessary for the average citizen to reach the professional standard of 'thinking (and writing) like a lawyer.'"
One of the recent approaches considers legal literacy as a metaphor. According to this view, the term is "intended to suggest some parallels between the institution of the law, and a system of language to be mastered, knowledge gained and understanding achieved". These authors suggest that the term legal literacy can also function as a model for educators who seek to promote such literacy. Proponents of legal literacy may thus look to the teaching of language for guidance.