Know Law, Use Law, Shape Law: Vivek Maru on Legal Empowerment

ABBAS: I am Abbas, Abbas Luyombo, a young justice leader, part of the YJL initiative of the Pathfinders for Peaceful, Just and Inclusive Societies, hosted by the New York University Center on International Cooperation. Today, my guest is Vivek Maru, CEO and co-founder of Namati, which advances social and environmental justice by combining the power of the law and the power of the people. Namati works with over sixty partner organizations in different countries, from Myanmar to the United States of America. They also co-host the Grassroots Justice Network, which brings together over three thousand community justice-based organizations across one hundred and seventy countries all over the world. Vivek is the co-author of Community and the Pursuit of Justice, and his TED Talk on putting the power of the law in the hands of the people has been listened to by millions of people across the world. As the Young Justice Leaders and the host of this podcast, I am happy to welcome Vivek today to share his experience and how we can all benefit. Vivek, I am profoundly honored to host you as a guest today. Good day, Vivek.

VIVEK: Hey Abbas, great to be here. Thank you so much.

ABBAS: Thank you for the time you have created. We will talk about quite a number of things in this conversation of around thirty to forty minutes, and I hope our listeners will benefit from your wealth of experience acquired over decades of work on access to justice. I will start with how community justice often works. Traditionally, there is an expert who comes in to serve a client. You clearly took a very different path, starting with TIMAP in Sierra Leone and now with Namati. Could you take our listeners back to the moment when you realized that the traditional model of a legal expert coming in to solve problems wasn’t working, and that there was a need for a dynamic shift?

VIVEK: Definitely. You mentioned Sierra Leone, which is a small country in West Africa — Sierra Leone really forced the question for me. Let me take a step back. I had gone to law school because I thought law was the language we use to translate dreams about justice into real institutions that hold us together. But when I got there, law seemed so disconnected from the people I cared about and the movements I admired. It felt so abstract. My grandmother, when I told her I was going to law school, said, “Lawyer is liar” — which was discouraging. I thought to myself, maybe I should have listened to her. I almost dropped out. But a couple of friends convinced me to hang in there, and I did end up graduating. I barely passed the bar exam. I clerked for a judge in California and worked for Human Rights Watch for a year. While I was there, I met someone — his name is Abdul Tejan Cole, a lawyer from Sierra Leone who had won an award from Human Rights Watch. He told me Sierra Leone was at a historic moment. An eleven-year civil war was just coming to an end, and there was a consensus that injustice was the reason the war had happened — this brutal conflict had torn the country apart because of arbitrariness in governance and abuse by authorities. Abdul was saying: we need to find a way to help people when they face injustice in their daily lives.

He was so compelling that I took him up on it. I went to this country I had never been to before and started working with a group of local human rights organizations on something like legal aid — how do we help people who face injustice in their daily lives? And as you said, the classic answer to that question is: don’t people need a lawyer? But in Sierra Leone, that was not workable. At the time, there were only one hundred lawyers in the entire country, and more than ninety of them were in the capital, Freetown. So if you went to the countryside, even if you were wealthy, it would be very hard to get legal help.

What we ended up doing was working with what we call community paralegals — sometimes known as barefoot lawyers. These are organizers who serve as a bridge between the law and the people who need it. We took inspiration from South Africa, where community paralegals have been active since the 1950s and were part of the anti-apartheid struggle. My partner Simeon Koroma, a young Sierra Leonean lawyer, and I recruited about ten community paralegals from five different chiefdoms around the country. We did an initial training on basic law and how government works, but we were genuinely uncertain about what would happen next.

It was those paralegals — and the communities they worked with — who showed me that when ordinary people learn and invoke the rules, it is possible to squeeze some justice out of broken systems. A woman who sold cigarettes and was sometimes a sex worker was able to get an apology and compensation from a police officer who had beaten her unconscious in the street. A farmer was able to stop a corrupt chief from seizing his harvest. Six villages were able to get a mining company to undam a river they had blocked and refill the pits they had left behind. We saw over and over that it was possible to make progress, even in such a difficult situation. And I’ve been kind of obsessed ever since.

ABBAS: That is great progress. Decentralizing the law so it is owned by the people — that resonates deeply. Moving forward, when I compare the situation in Sierra Leone you described with the work Namati does today, I think about environmental law. I have done a lot of work around social and environmental justice myself, and in my practice I have seen that many laws around environmental and climate protection have not really been used by those most affected by climate change — especially minority groups and indigenous communities. Could you share a story where you have effectively used the law to empower a community to defend against a land grab or an environmental crisis? Something that might inspire our listeners around the world.

VIVEK: I’d love to. I completely agree that the environment is one of many areas where what we have written on paper in law is very different from what happens in practice — there is a huge gap in enforcement. Let me tell you a story, also from Sierra Leone, from years later. The group I run now is called Namati, and we have a team in Sierra Leone. Around 2015, a European oil palm company secured a lease agreement for seventy-five thousand acres of rainforest — fifty years, for two dollars per acre per year. They did this without the consent of the approximately twenty thousand people who live on that land. An illiterate interim paramount chief, appointed by the government, had thumb-printed this lease agreement four hours away from the land in question, behind closed doors, without the knowledge of the people who live there.

There is a woman from that community — Mrs. Jallow. She had been a refugee during Sierra Leone’s civil war, fleeing by boat to Guinea with her family. When she heard about the lease, she said: I do not want to become a refugee again. I do not want to lose my home. Mrs. Jallow comes from a traditional Muslim family. She does not know how to read or write — she was never sent to school. But Mrs. Jallow knows how to fight.

She organized a residents’ association. They started trying to make sense of what had happened and reached out to a pair of community paralegals working with Namati. The first thing the paralegals did was obtain a copy of the lease agreement — which the communities had never seen — and translate it into simple language the community could understand. They looked at it together and found that there were many violations, both in the substantive provisions and in the way it had been signed. Armed with that information, Mrs. Jallow and the residents’ association confronted the traditional authorities and the company. They demonstrated en masse. It took nearly two years. But eventually the company backed down and acknowledged that the lease agreement was invalid.

Mrs. Jallow said: “We learned our rights. We learned that no one can bend our hand, no one can take our land.” Land grabs like that happen all the time around the world, but reversing one is very rare. This was a huge breakthrough. Today, we are working with Mrs. Jallow and those communities to negotiate a fair deal with the Gola Rainforest Park — the largest rainforest park in West Africa — which provides benefits related to healthcare, education, and agroforestry to the communities living around it. What Mrs. Jallow said to me was: “I want a way of flourishing that involves stewarding our place rather than allowing it to be destroyed.” Environmental justice today involves helping people say no to land grabs and reckless destruction — but equally, helping people say yes to forms of development that are sustainable and that people actually want.

ABBAS: That is such a great success, especially in Africa where these problems collide with huge investment interests. For the benefit of our listeners, could you break down what you mean by the concept of a community paralegal, and what the outcomes of this model tend to look like?

VIVEK: Absolutely. Traditionally, if you go to a lawyer’s office in Freetown, they will say: let me go handle this for you. Put some money on the table — I’ve got you, I’m going to solve this for you. That is the traditional lawyer’s message. A community paralegal’s message is different: you and I are going to solve this together. And in the process, we will both grow — both become more aware, more powerful. Community paralegals really center the agency of people facing injustice. They treat people as agents rather than victims.

In terms of outcomes, we have a growing body of evidence that community paralegals and legal empowerment can generate meaningful results. The World Bank did an evaluation of TIMAP for Justice in Sierra Leone, which found that large proportions of people who came to our office were satisfied with the service and the remedy they obtained. A randomized controlled trial of a similar paralegal effort in Liberia showed significant improvements in people’s wellbeing, food security, and sense of safety. And it’s not just Africa — there is recent evidence from a community paralegal program in Alaska, one of the US states with around two hundred community paralegals, showing that those paralegals recovered twenty-three million dollars in unpaid food stamp benefits for people, with an estimated public benefit of twenty-five dollars for every federal dollar invested.

I would also add that the phrase “access to justice” sometimes implies the system is fine and we just need to get people in the door. That is not my experience. The systems themselves are often causing injustice. So we like to think of a legal empowerment cycle: know law, use law, shape law. We want everyone — no matter where they were born or what their station — to be able to do those three things.

To pick up the Sierra Leone story: Mrs. Jallow’s community took on that land grab, and paralegals across the country worked on three hundred similar cases over ten years. From those cases grew wisdom about how the system was working in practice. People from across those cases came together to compare notes, reflect on what they had seen, and begin to dream about what a better system would look like. That movement ultimately conceived of and fought for a new law — the Customary Land Rights Act — passed in 2022. It is one of the most progressive land laws in the world. It guarantees that every community across Sierra Leone has the right to free, prior, and informed consent over any industrial activity on their territory. It empowers local land use committees and requires that at least one-third of their members be women, so women are always at the table when decisions about land are made. That law would never have passed without the leadership of people like Mrs. Jallow. That is the legal empowerment cycle — from knowing and using law to tackle a problem in front of you, to coming together with others to shape law and build better systems. And the reason it is a cycle rather than a one-way street is that when you do pass something like the Customary Land Rights Act, it doesn’t implement itself. The law then provides new levers and hooks that paralegals and communities can use to solve problems — and in doing so, breathe life into it. That is the wheel we want to keep turning.

ABBAS: I am captivated by the idea of the empowerment cycle — know the law, use the law, shape the law. At what point do you think you can fairly conclude that the cycle is complete and a community is strong enough to sustain it on their own? What would you gauge as success?

VIVEK: That is a great question. Honestly, I don’t think of it as something that is ever finished — that work is never done, Abbas. I think of it as a wheel we need to keep turning. It represents a deeper version of democracy. Democracy means that the rules are not distant or abstract — they are something all of us take part in knowing, using, and shaping. This is the wheel we need to keep turning toward systems that are just and sustainable.

ABBAS: I hope many of our listeners can take up that idea of the legal empowerment cycle. I believe it can truly strengthen communities and make law something owned by the people. I would love your thoughts on what role justice financing plays — whether it hinders or catalyzes this legal empowerment cycle — and what we could do to direct financing toward this model.

VIVEK: Such an important question. The vast majority of public money put into the justice system goes into what I would call the supply side of justice — the courts, police, judges, the Ministry of Justice, prosecutors. A very tiny fraction — usually less than one percent — goes into what I would call the demand side of justice: direct support to people so they can actually engage those institutions. That balance is wrong. We should increase the proportion going to the demand side. And when we do, we shouldn’t limit ourselves to lawyer-based legal aid — we should think about community paralegals, which allow us to serve more people in a more empowering way at a much lower cost.

ABBAS: Do you think governments have a role to play here, or is this more the domain of civil society?

VIVEK: I do think enlightened governments can and should invest in this bottom-up work of legal empowerment. One breakthrough we had in Sierra Leone was getting a Legal Aid Law passed in 2012, which recognized the role of community paralegals and set up a Legal Aid Board that today finances paralegals working across the country. It is possible for government to finance this kind of work. What is crucial, though, is that the independence of community paralegals and legal empowerment efforts is respected. What we would love to see are mechanisms — like a legal aid board or human rights commission — that can receive public funding but channel those resources into civil society groups rooted in communities, while protecting their independence. That is not practical in all settings, particularly where the government is outright repressive. But it is something to strive for in many places.

ABBAS: That brings me to the point of shrinking civic space. We see democracy weakening in many contexts, and international capital exerting enormous pressure. Giving the law to the people means empowering them to confront deep-seated powers — which exposes community paralegals to real physical risks. How have you dealt with these challenges, and what would you recommend to listeners who find themselves at that clashing point?

VIVEK: No doubt, Abbas — we are living through a crisis. Freedom House tracks data on democratic progress, and I believe this is the seventeenth consecutive year in which more countries have become less democratic than have improved. The group Global Witness tracks killings of grassroots environmental defenders and has found that an environmental defender is killed every other day. People who stand up for human rights and for the planet are often at grave risk. I don’t want to minimize the real and serious dangers that this work involves.

That said, I have been inspired by the courage of people who have nonetheless stood up to defend themselves and their neighbors. We have found strategies that can help mitigate the risk, and they really come down to one thing: avoiding isolation. No one should be standing up alone. Solidarity is one of the key sources of safety.

I would name two types of solidarity. First, a vertical network: paralegals should always be backed up by lawyers who can litigate when push comes to shove and pull different legal levers. They should be part of a network that includes journalists, advocates in the capital city, and international groups that can bring attention when needed. Second, a local network: if someone like Mrs. Jallow is standing up in isolation, she is more vulnerable. But if people are taking collective action and communities are speaking with one voice, they are safer.

I was recently at a rally in Washington D.C. about abusive practices by immigration enforcement officials. A pastor at the rally called out: “Who keeps us safe?” And the crowd responded: “We keep us safe.” There is real truth in that call and response — solidarity with one another is at the core of how we protect ourselves.

ABBAS: “Who keeps us safe? We keep us safe.” That is powerful. I would like to move to a critical group in the justice cycle — young people. In my experience, many young people feel that justice systems are slow, reactive, and disconnected from their lives. There is real fatigue with the sector. What would be your message to young people on how they can use legal empowerment tools to see themselves — and become — agents of justice, rather than victims of the system?

VIVEK: Such an important question. I would point young people to you, Abbas, as an example of someone who has overcome obstacles, maintained faith in the possibility of justice, and stood up to advocate for yourself and others — even in a difficult political environment like Uganda’s. When we see people standing up, we ourselves take courage and inspiration.

You are right that the cynicism and frustration young people feel is real and justified. The systems we have are failing us — on climate, on basic economic wellbeing, on equality. When you see so much systemic failure, it is depressing. But what I want to say to young people is: you are not wrong. The law is broken. But if we know it, we can use it. I have seen that over and over in some of the most difficult places in the world. And if we use it, we can fix it. That cycle — know law, use law, shape law — is where I believe hope lives.

ABBAS: That is powerful. The hope that by using even an unfair law, you come to know it — and then you can shape it into something better. That leads me to my second-to-last question: what are your thoughts on the internet as a tool for decentralizing justice?

VIVEK: It is fundamental to the world we are living in. Technology always carries dangers as well as benefits, so we have to be aware of the risks while harnessing what is positive. The Grassroots Justice Network — which all listeners are invited to join at grassrootsjustice.net — has a dynamic member called the Legal Aid Society of Pakistan. They used AI to build a chatbot that offers basic legal help, trained on thousands of cases that their paralegals and legal aid lawyers had handled. You can use the chatbot to get quick legal advice, and if you need more help than what the chatbot can provide, it connects you with a paralegal or lawyer. It is a powerful way of making basic legal information available to many more people than they could reach directly. AI and the internet are transforming our world, and we want to be ahead of that, not behind it.

ABBAS: And finally, Vivek — having worked in and around justice systems for over twenty years, what is the one thing you most desire to see reformed? What would make you feel that justice is genuinely on the right path?

VIVEK: We need a system that works for everyone. Far too often, our justice system works to empower a tiny minority and does not work for the majority. I go back to what Abraham Lincoln said at the Gettysburg Address: we need a justice system that is of the people, by the people, and for the people. When we have that, I will be happy.

ABBAS: A justice system for the people and by the people. Vivek, we are exceedingly honored as the Young Justice Leaders initiative for the time you have given to share with us today. I am fully convinced that our listeners have taken a great deal from this discussion on access to justice, legal empowerment, and the empowerment cycle. Before we close, do you have any parting words for our listeners?

VIVEK: I would just say: if you are looking at the world around you and seeing unfairness and systemic failure, you are not alone. There is a pathway. By coming together and combining legal power with people power, we can make progress. I invite you to join us — sign up for the Grassroots Justice Network, be part of a truly global movement with people from one hundred and eighty countries, deeply rooted community by community. Let’s build the world we need together.

ABBAS: Wonderful. Let’s come together and build the world we all wish to live in — and hand it on to the next generation. Thank you, Vivek.