CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2010
| Author | Carrillo Justiniano, Maricarmen |
|---|---|
| Title | Lawyers' Role Addressing Poverty Issues: A Puerto Rican Experience |
| Summary | This thesis is about the lawyer's role in the fight against poverty. Human rights and the capability approach to poverty provide lawyers a framework to determine a role compatible with a humanist practice, and that shall be aimed to secure its clients’ human rights and thus their “human capabilities” to freely reach their well being. Nevertheless, to be endowed with “human capabilities” need more than the full enjoyment of human rights. The social nature of poverty requires the people to organize to transform the structures of oppression and resist moments of domination to effect lasting change. Therefore, the lawyer’s role working with people living in poverty shall be aimed to empower the poor in an ongoing process in which they become the principal character in the transformation of their reality.The experience of a Puerto Rican legal aid clinic shows the effectiveness of the lawyer’s role based in new theories of law practice in the struggle against poverty. The legal clinic’s work with various low income communities with similar problems but with different contexts was divided in three case studies, and evaluated in the light of its potential to promote its clients’ “human capabilities” to freely achieve their notion of well being and to further collective action. |
| Supervisor | Macklem, Patrick |
| Department | Legal Studies LLM |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2010/carrillo-justiniano_maricarmen.pdf |
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