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World governments have embraced ‘legal empowerment’ as an end in itself and as an essential element in the fight against poverty. Civil society groups work to advance legal empowerment around the globe but, to date, there is not a comprehensive understanding of the impact of those efforts. This article offers the first review and mapping of existing evidence on legal empowerment. We identified and analyzed 199 studies in total. These studies span every major continent and address a wide range of legal empowerment interventions, such as legal literacy, community-based paralegals, and use of right to information laws. The breadth and richness of this body of work suggest we should revisit previous perceptions that there is little evidence on what legal empowerment can achieve. Stronger agency— both people’s willingness to act and actual action—as well as increased legal knowledge are the most common positive impacts reported in this collection of evidence. The evidence also suggests legal empowerment programs can lead to acquisition of legal remedies, effective conflict resolution, and even improvements This effort has benefitted from many contributors. In particular, we would like to thank Gregory Barrett,
Daniel Brinks, Varun Gauri, John Gaventa, Bilal Siddiqi, and Michael Woolcock for their guidance in defining the scope and methodology of this review. We express our deep gratitude to Hazim Al-Eryani, Srinivas Ayyagari, Denise Bell, Luciana Debenedetti, Beth Goldberg, David Kienzler, Amarachi Utah, Allison Vuillaume for their invaluable assistance with researching reviewing, and/or coding studies. Big thanks to Akhila Kolisetty, and Karima Tawfik for additional research assistance. We are also extremely appreciative of those who commented on an earlier draft of this article, including Emily Brown, Marco de Swart, Adrian Di Giovanni, Pilar Domingo, William Evans, Tamar Ezer, Macha Farrant, Suella Fernandes, Martin Gramatikov, Shelley Inglis, Ralf Jurgens, Monjurul Kabir, Zaza Namoradze, Joss Saunders, Lotta Teale, Lars Waldorf, Meghan Watkinson, and others who helped shape the original scope of inquiry, recommended additional pieces of impact evidence for this review, or provided other advice along the way. in health and education outcomes. Nearly ninety studies find positive impacts of
legal empowerment programs on institutions—changes in law, policy or practice at various levels of administration. After exploring distributions and trends in the evidence, the article concludes by identifying gaps and questions for further inquiry
to guide future research and, ultimately, promote stronger, more evidence-based practice.