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Legal awareness

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Legal awareness , sometimes called public legal education , 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

Definition of Legal awareness

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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

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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

Need and importance

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Anoop Kumar, a researcher of Legal Literacy Mission, says in his study, "the legislature of the state and the parliament, while enacting the legislation, consider the objectives of it. Some laws lay down the substantive rights of the masses and some touch upon the procedural aspect of certain laws. But it is due to lack of awareness of beneficiaries that most of the legislations are ineffective at the stage of their execution." Legal awareness can empower people to demand justice, accountability and effective remedies at all levels. Legal needs always stand to become crisis oriented because their ignorance prevents them from anticipating legal troubles and approaching a lawyer for consultation and advice in time. This magnifies the impact of their legal troubles and difficulties when they come. Without (legal) literacy people can get intimidated and alienated from law. This may evolve into a situation which results in people coming into conflict with the law, or being unable

Obstacles

According to Lorenzo Cotula, laws are usually published in the official gazette, few people outside legal circles have access to legal information. Illiteracy, economic barriers, language barriers, social taboos and a lack of zeal among the legal fraternity may lead to obstacles in gaining requisite levels of legal literacy. According to Hanna Hasl-Kelchner, at times lack of zeal among lawyers make them prone to saying no and killing a deal rather than working through the issues and finding solutions that are both practical and legally sound. In a note to the UN General Assembly 67th session, the UN Secretary General states, "the deprivations that persons living in poverty encounter throughout their lives — lack of access to quality education, reduced access to information, limited political voice and social capital — translate into lower levels of legal literacy and awareness of their rights, creating social obstacles to seeking redress". The absence of a legal culture and t

Institutional and corporate legal literacy

Corporate, institutions and NGOs are subject to and are supposed to follow various sets of laws. Corporate legal literacy edit Legal awareness is an important part of professional work life. According to John Akula, when law-sensitive issues arise, corporate executives often find themselves in what is, for them, unmapped territory, often without requisite law training. When corporate executives work with attorneys they need to develop a common language to bridge probable communication gaps to achieve legal astituteness. According to Hanna Hasl-Kelchner, legal literacy can help to bridge the gap between law and business by simplifying legal terms into language that makes business sense and offers a new way to think about the law as a useful business tool. She says, "corporate legal literacy involves balanced understanding of cross disciplinary influences bringing in legal risk exposure, avoiding lawsuits and transforming potential business legal issues that threaten growth and prof

Related concepts

There are certain related concepts including legal consciousness, legal mobilization and legal socialization, legal empowerment, that helps to put legal literacy in perspective. Civics and socio-legal literacy edit Despite semantic proximity education of civics, civics literacy and legal literacy are not exactly the same. In the "legal literacy" semantic components are the dominant notion of the "right", "law", "responsibility to the law", and "civic literacy" added to them the concept of "civil society", "individual rights and freedoms" and "man's responsibility to civil society". In the formal civic education system, human rights can be taken up as a part of civic education, values education and social studies, though they may have the limitation of presenting only certain aspects of human rights rather than their integrated whole, and duties of citizens may be overly emphasized to the detriment of ce

Legal literacy mission

China conducts Nationwide Legal Awareness Raising Campaigns (NLARC) this five-year program has been conducted since 1986. National Legal Services Authority (India) conducted a five-year nationwide "National Legal Literacy Mission" from 2005 to 2010.

Legal literacy events and celebrations

Between March 20 to April 5 annual legal awareness celebrations take place in Australia. Australian Employee Legal Awareness Day is held annually on February 13. In India, National Legal Literacy Day is on November 9.

Internet and legal literacy

The Internet as a legal research tool is advantageous for most primary legal research materials, which can be located for free to supplement fee-based services and library collections. The Internet offers increased access to resources, low- or no-cost access, and real-time information via social media. Author Roger Smith, an expert in domestic and international aspects of legal aid, human rights and access to justice; says in his article "IT changes bring hope – and hype", that Technology offers the opportunity significantly to cut costs and to leverage existing provision. Author Roger Smith further believes there is enough to suggest potential usage of internet and its interactive capacities of internet in information sharing. According to Roger Smith (Internet and) Technology also opens up the possibility of providing ‘just in time’ public legal education which might just be the answer to the yawning gap in family law advice. Roger Smith further says 'technology can b

Important institutions promoting legal awareness and legal literacy

Bar councils, lawyer federations and various NGOs take the lead in promoting legal awareness and legal literacy. In India, as per the Legal Services Authorities Act, 1987, the National Legal Services Authority (NLSA) has been designated to take appropriate measures for spreading legal literacy and legal awareness amongst the people. In Indiana, in the United States, Outreach for Legal Literacy (OLL) is a community service program in which law students teach law to fifth-graders in local elementary schools.