Should Civic Literacy and Legal Literacy Be Married?

In a recent piece, I mentioned the issue of legal literacy as an element of access to justice issues.

To define, “access to justice” is the extent to which non-wealthy citizens have access to the judicial system sufficient to obtain remedies to legal problems.

 Legal literacy is the extent to which individuals are aware of the general framework of the legal system, and knowledge of how to address legal problems within it.

 To me, it is axiomatic that legal literacy must be an aspect of “access to justice” issues because one who is unaware of their rights under the law would have no reason to discover how to access justice. 

Facts that reflect on access to justice issues include the estimation that only 33% of statistically expected legal needs of Maryland’s poor and near poor are addressed. More broadly, Michael Greco, President, ABA, writes that “numerous reliable studies at the national and state levels have documented that 70% to 80% of the civil legal needs of poor people go unaddressed year after year.            
The term, “Civic literacy” refers to knowledge by individuals of how government works. Courses in civics generally focus on organizational facts, such as the fact that our federal government is divided into 3 branches of government, and that there are 50 states, or the separations of powers concept. Facts that reflect on civic literacy issues include national studies (for instance a 2005 study commissioned by the American Bar Association) that show that only 55% of adult Americans “can correctly identify the three branches of government,” only 45% can identify the meaning of the concept of separation of powers, and only 36% cannot correctly identify the principle of checks and balances.

 In studying these two issues, I have confronted what I believe to be the oddest and most unnatural dilemma. Generally, I am finding literature on civic literacy divorced from literature on legal literacy. Accordingly, when trying to appreciate the societal landscape of organizations addressing civic literacy and legal literacy, I find myself being asked to make a choice I find unnatural, namely, am I trying to assess the landscape of programs addressing issues of legal literacy, or civil literacy? It is fair to say that there are intellectual or conceptual differences between the framework of the governmental structure in which we live, the framework of the laws under which we live, and an individual’s rights to protect one’s rights under those laws or push for new ones.

From the engaged citizen’s standpoint, it all goes hand in hand. The engaged active citizen is both politically active, such as in supporting various candidates, able to protect (either personally or through locating counsel) his or her rights under the law (either as a plaintiff or defendant), and is knowledgeable how to advocate for or against government action between election cycles, such as when citizen groups speak out on laws relating to anything from abortion to inclusionary zoning, or on whether a police commissioner should be fired for engaging in racial profiling.

 A 2002 report by the United States Agency for International Development Office of Democracy and Governance found that civic engagement programs were most effective when participants learned about opportunities for participation, in addition to concepts relating to participation. It would be illogical to think legal literacy functions differently. It is the engaged active citizen model that interests me because it encompasses legal literacy, civic literacy, and the ability and confidence to act on both fields of knowledge.

 It is my opinion that any citizen who lacks any of these three aspects of being an engaged active citizen, namely being (1) civically literate, (2) legally literate, and (3) familiar with one’s rights to advocate is not fully an engaged active citizen, and may require education to compensate for the lack. In The End of Education, Neal Postman posits that successful educational systems are one where the ends are clearly defined. Thus, I think absent the clearly defined goal of an engage active citizen, civic literacy efforts and legal literacy efforts will inevitably ultimately fall short in some manner.