From South Carolina Law Review:
In democracy, justice is supposed to be everyone’s: everyday people are meant to participate meaningfully in shaping law’s content, using its protections, and fulfilling the obligations it creates. Research demonstrates very clearly, however, that justice is not available to everyone. Global estimates suggest that over 5 billion people, nearly two-thirds of the world’s population, live outside the protection of the law. Critical to justice being everyone having access to it. Yet all too often access to justice is constrained by regulatory capture, administrative burden, and institutional failures that estrange people from their own law. The estrangement of people from their own law is not just a problem of social welfare policy or justice service delivery, it is a failure of democracy. This paper explores the role of access to justice in building and enlivening democracy through a critical mechanism to demonopolize and democratize the law: justice workers. Justice workers are community members who enable their neighbors to access justice by helping them to understand, use, and shape the laws that order their lives. They may do this as part of their formal roles such as religious leaders, teachers, social workers, librarians, or healthcare providers, or simply as fellow members of a community.