A measure of justice: Citizen legal advocates, lay lawyering, and access to justice in Russia

Abstract

What can access to justice look like in an authoritarian setting? In Russia, the law allows ordinary citizens who do not have a legal education to act as so-called citizen legal advocates (CLAs) in both criminal cases and cases on administrative offenses (non-criminal infractions). Drawing on qualitative fieldwork among CLAs in training sessions and in court, we show that lay people can enhance access to justice by impacting defendants’ experiences of the legal process itself despite the likely negative legal outcome. Through their multiple roles from legal advisors and coaches to guardians of prisoner welfare, we demonstrate the ways that lay people can contribute to access to justice at every stage of a defendant's journey through the system. Examining the case of lay lawyering in a repressive setting enables us to elicit and zoom in on practices—often obscured in the existing outcome-oriented scholarship—that are meaningful for access to justice in courts and prisons across the democratic/authoritarian divide.