Access to Justice and Legal Clinics: Developing a Reflective Lawyering Space. Some Insights from the Italian Experience. WP CSDLE “Massimo D’Antona”.INT – 141/2017

Barbera, Marzia and Protopapa, Venera (2017) Access to Justice and Legal Clinics: Developing a Reflective Lawyering Space. Some Insights from the Italian Experience. WP CSDLE “Massimo D’Antona”.INT – 141/2017. [Working Paper]

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Abstract

The paper will explore the potential of legal clinics in contributing to making access to justice more effective. It intends to do so in the light of a critical assessment of the Italian system of access to justice, while taking into account the peculiarities of legal clinics as a public interest law actor. To this end, the paper will move along a double dimension of access to justice and the different approaches to the issue of effective access to justice associated with each dimension. The first approach relies on an individualistic conceptualization of access to justice and focuses on providing legal services to those unable to afford a lawyer. The second one looks at access to justice as a collective right and, rather than focusing on the need for legal services of specific individuals, aims to address the problem of legal representation in court of group and collective interests. This considered, the paper will analyze the Italian system of access to justice with the aim of highlighting its shortcomings. It will provide a brief description of the institutional context of legal aid in Italy and assess its effectiveness in terms of granting legal assistance to those unable to afford a lawyer. It will than offer an account of the mechanisms aiming to ensure effective access to justice, at the individual and/or collective level that have been put in place by private and governmental actors, focusing first on the court enforcement of the Workers’ Statute then on gender equality legislation and finally on the more recent experience of enforcement of antidiscrimination law provisions concerning, race, ethnic origin and nationality.

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