The Mandarins of the Law: Pro Bono Legal Work from a Comparative Perspective

The right to access to justice is one of the pillars of modern liberal democracies. On the one hand, it allows citizens to solve their conflicts by appealing to courts and to the administration.1 On the other, as argued in the theoretical papers gathered in Part I, it allows citizens to choose and realize their life projects and to be fully included in the political community. Yet, all modern liberal democracies suffer an access to justice deficit to varying degrees. As argued in the introduction of this special issue, class, epistemological and market inequalities create notable obstacles to the materialization of the right to access to justice. Modern liberal democracies have developed four institutions— public defenders’ offices, court-appointed counsel, legal clinics, and pro bono work—to realize the State’s and lawyers’ obligations to securing the right to access to justice for all. This article is focused on only one of these institutions: pro bono legal work. This article pursues two intertwined aims: first, it describes and analyzes the conceptual architecture that supports pro bono work;2 second, using these theoretical tools, it describes and analyzes the pro bono discourse and practices developed in Argentina, Colombia, and Chile.