Participatory Law Scholarship

Participatory Law Scholarship (PLS) brings legal scholars and people with firsthand expertise of the legal system together to create legal knowledge. By treating lived experience as expertise, PLS expands whose voices shape legal scholarship and creates new ways to understand, challenge, and change the law.

What is Participatory Law Scholarship?

Participatory Law Scholarship (PLS) is legal scholarship created collaboratively by legal academics and people with firsthand experience of the legal system. Rather than treating people affected by the law solely as subjects of legal analysis, PLS recognizes their lived experiences as a form of expertise and places them at the center of creating legal knowledge. PLS is grounded in the belief that individuals and communities who have experienced the law’s injustices are uniquely positioned to identify it's failures, challenge its assumptions, and imagine how the system can change.

Purposes of PLS

  • Center lived experience: Bring the perspectives of people most directly affected by the law into legal scholarship, education, and policymaking.

  • Recognize experiential expertise: Treat firsthand knowledge of the law’s impact as a legitimate and valuable form of legal knowledge.

  • Challenge dominant narratives: Use lived experience to expose gaps between the law’s ideals and how it actually operates in people’s lives.

  • Democratize legal knowledge: Expand who gets to participate in creating legal scholarship and shaping legal meaning beyond those with formal legal training.

  • Support legal and social change: Create meaningful opportunities for experiential experts to shape legal education, scholarship, advocacy, and law reform.

Impacts of PLS

Influencing Supreme Court decisions

Contributing to law reform efforts

Shaping human rights jurisprudence

PLS in the News

2027 PLS Convening: Reconstructing Legal Knowledge From the Bottom Up

March 12, 2027

Learn More

Temple University Beasley School of Law launches the Participatory Law Fund (PLF), providing awards to co-authors of PLS who have no formal legal training and are not academics, but have expertise in law’s injustices through lived experience.

PLS is adopted into the mission of the NYU Review of Law and Social Change.

Rachel E. Lopez, Terrell Carter, & Kempis “Ghani” Songster receive the 2022 Law and Society Association Article Prize, recognized for their exceptional scholarship in socio-legal studies for a journal article.