Methodology
PLS brings together legal and experiential expertise to collaboratively shape the questions, analysis, and arguments of legal scholarship. In doing so, it challenges long-standing assumptions about who can produce legal knowledge. The articles on this page describe and develop PLS as a methodology. They trace its origins, set out its core principles, and grapple with the questions that arise when legal scholars and experiential experts write together: how to share authorship and credit, how to make decisions collaboratively, how to address imbalances of power, and how to bring this work into a legal academy that has not always made room for it.
Several of these articles were themselves written collaboratively by legal scholars and experiential experts, putting the method into practice even as they describe it. They offer a foundation for anyone interested in understanding, practicing, or teaching PLS.
Understanding the Theory and Practice
of Participatory Law Scholarship
Participatory Law Scholarship
This article explores what happens when people with firsthand experience of the legal system become coauthors of legal scholarship. Drawing on the authors’ collaboration with two activists sentenced to life without parole, the article introduces Participatory Law Scholarship (PLS), an approach that treats lived experience as a form of legal expertise.
PLS challenges traditional ideas about who gets to produce legal knowledge and whose experiences are reflected in the law. By centering firsthand accounts, PLS exposes the gap between how law is written and how it is experienced, while creating space for new narratives, legal change, and social movements.
Rachel López, Participatory Law Scholarship, 123 Columbia L. Rev. 1795 (2023).
Participatory Law Scholarship as Demosprudence
This article explores how legal scholarship can make the law more accessible and democratic by centering the experiences of people most affected by it. Drawing on their work with Kempis Songster and Gerald Torres, the authors situate Participatory Law Scholarship (PLS) within the concept of “demosprudence”—the idea that ordinary people play a role in shaping legal meaning and social change. The article argues that traditional legal scholarship can alienate people from the law, while PLS invites those without formal legal training to participate in developing legal knowledge and theory. Ultimately, PLS offers a way to strengthen democracy by connecting law to lived experience.
Kempis Songster, Rachel López, & Gerald Torres, Participatory Law Scholarship as Demosprudence, 110 Va. L. Rev. Online 298 (2024).
If Lived Experience Could Speak: A Method for Repairing Epistemic Violence in Law and the Legal Academy
This article explores how legal scholarship can be transformed by centering the voices of people most directly affected by the law. Drawing on their experience coauthoring Redeeming Justice, Terrell Carter and Rachel López examine how participatory scholarship can challenge the traditional boundaries of legal expertise. By treating lived experience as a source of legal knowledge, Participatory Law Scholarship (PLS) gives marginalized communities a greater role in shaping legal theory and meaning. The article argues that those who have experienced injustice are uniquely positioned to critique the systems that produced it, and that centering their perspectives can help democratize legal scholarship and create meaningful legal change.
Terrell Carter & Rachel López, If Lived Experience Could Speak: A Method for Repairing Epistemic Violence in Law and the Legal Academy, 109 Minn. L. Rev. 1 (2024).
This forward reflects on how Participatory Legal Scholarship (PLS) has grown from an experiential approach into an emerging field of legal scholarship. Drawing on the authors’ own experience developing PLS with an incarcerated co-author, it celebrates the increasing recognition of scholarship that combines legal expertise with the knowledge of people directly affected by the law. At the same time, the authors caution against the risks of PLS becoming another form of academic extraction, where institutions benefit from experiential experts without meaningfully changing how knowledge and resources are distributed. The foreword ultimately calls for sustained institutional support and greater investment in experiential experts to ensure PLS remains a transformative practice.
Foreword: The New Frontier of Participatory Legal Scholarship
Terrell Woolfolk & Rachel López, Foreword: The New Frontier of Participatory Legal Scholarship, 48 N.Y.U. L. Rev. of L. & Soc. Change 317 (2025).
Experiential Expertise in Law: What Lived Experience Can Teach
This article examines how the lived experiences of people affected by systemic injustice can shape legal scholarship and policymaking. The article explores “experiential expertise” as a form of knowledge developed through firsthand experience with the law, particularly among marginalized communities. Drawing on standpoint feminism and Participatory Law Scholarship, it argues that experiential expertise can raise overlooked legal questions, challenge dominant understandings of the law, and offer an important counterweight to originalist approaches to legal interpretation. Ultimately, the article calls on legal and academic institutions to recognize and support experiential experts as valuable contributors to the development of law and policy.
Rachel López, Experiential Expertise in Law: What Lived Experience Can Teach, 105 B.U. L. Rev. 1189 (2025).
Presented at:
BU Law Review Symposium on Law and Expertise, November 16, 2024.