Page 111 - Impact: Collected Essays on Expanding Access to Justice

of law . As a result, in the 1990s lawyers in Latin America began to explore the possible utility of public interest law to advance justice and fundamental rights in the region .3
The practice of public interest law in Latin America was partly an outgrowth of the flow of young Latin American lawyers to the United States for further study . In addition to gaining an awareness of public interest litigation, these lawyers were introduced to clinical legal education and the Law and Development movement, a joint project of the U .S . Agency for International Development (USAID), the Ford Foundation, and professors from leading U .S . law schools, which posited the view that law reform could lead to social change; that law was in fact the prime engine of social change .4 Their return to Latin America was the start of a movement to transform legal education, incorporating constitutional interpretation, the case method, public interest law and clinical education into a curriculum that had for decades been focused solely on analysis of legal codes . New law schools were opened and law school faculties were increasingly composed of younger lawyers with training outside the region, taking the place of a generation of lawyers lost to the dictatorships . Early projects undertaken by the clinics involved issues such as consumer matters and the language rights of indigenous communities . The work done by legal service programs in the United States to address poverty both systemically and through individual representation was not part of the reform agenda in Latin America .
In the early 2000s there was a growing recognition by lawyers at non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and law school clinics of the need for more lawyers to engage in public interest and human rights matters . Lawyers in small and solo practices who had previously taken up human rights cases were not taking on individual representations to effectuate newly recognized rights or to provide assistance to the disadvantaged . Demand was way ahead of supply . Though many of the new constitutions recognized a right to counsel in both civil and criminal matters, implementation of this right was generally limited to criminal representation through public defender systems .
Given the history of the region, access to justice was seen as a critical component to support democratic government . It was understood to incorporate public confidence in the fairness, transparency and efficiency of the judicial system and the legal profession; in government policies that addressed social needs; and in public understanding of legal rights . Enforcement of rights guaranteed by statute and the constitution was necessary to sustain the larger democratic exercise .
Lawyers in Argentina and Chile were the first to take an interest in pro bono as a means of expanding the pool of available lawyers . Although corporate law firms in Latin America are concentrated in the capital cities and are smaller than their U .S . counterparts -- twenty to one hundred lawyer firms in most countries, with Brazil being the exception with five hundred lawyer firms -- they nonetheless provided a reservoir of potential recruits . Pro bono also offered the opportunity to encourage the idea of the legal profession’s ethical responsibility to promote access to justice, and a way to engage bar associations in the reform of the legal structure . Over a five-year period interest in pro bono spread from the countries of the Southern Cone to Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and to a lesser extent other countries in the region .
3 Email from Martin Bohmer, Global Professor of Law, NYu Law in Buenos Aires to Joan Vermeulen, Director, Vance Center for International Justice (Nov. 1, 2000).
4 Law and Development Movement, world bank, http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTLAW JuSTINST/0,,contentMDK:23103515~menuPK:1989584~pagePK:210058~piPK:210062~theSitePK:1974062~is CuRL:Y,00.html (last visited May 15, 2016).
Alternative Models
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