Regional Course on Public Interest Lawyering 2026

PILnet and the School of Law at Fordham University are launching the sixth round of the Asia Regional Course on Public Interest Lawyering for lawyers and representatives of NGOs in Asia.

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At a glance

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PILnet and the School of Law at Fordham University are launching the sixth round of the Asia Regional Course on Public Interest Lawyering for lawyers and representatives of NGOs in Asia. This year, the course will focus on the intersections of technology and public interest lawyering. This 6-week online course aims to create a channel for early-career public interest-minded lawyers to gain experience and an international perspective on public interest lawyering, as well as to create a platform for network building. The course runs for 6 weeks (about 3 hours per week) from 13th March to 17th April, 2026. 

The course is divided into the following five thematic sessions. Within each session, the topic of technology will be examined as an entry point to analyse cross-cutting elements and intersections with other relevant themes (information and democracy, climate justice, gender, minority rights, children’s rights, etc.)

• Access to Justice is a foundational concept for the way public interest lawyers think about their societies. This is because the problem of unmet legal needs means that law is not working for everyone and, as a result, that the legal systems may be treating some people unfairly or favoring the interests of some at the expense of others. Recognizing the problem is the first step for public interest lawyers in thinking of ways to address it.
• Legal Empowerment addresses unmet legal needs by using low cost methods, like paralegals. Unlike litigation, which seeks to remedy problems after the fact, legal empowerment seeks to anticipate future problems by providing timely targeted advice that can prevent or mitigate potential harm. Whether this approach can be used strategically to effect broader change, is not yet well established.
• Pro Bono Publico calls to mind the responsibility of the legal profession in helping to address the unmet legal needs of society by acting for the public good. For the privilege of being able to practice law, all lawyers have a duty to help ensure that the legal system is not just serving the interests of paying clients. How far this duty goes and what it means in practice is viewed differently in various societies, and it is often in competition, or even conflict, with the commercial practice of law.
• Strategic Litigation involves selecting and litigating key cases that have the potential to effect change beyond the interests of a specific client. Perhaps because the express premise of this strategy is that some cases can have an impact that serves the public interest, it has become the best known form of public interest lawyering. But it is not the only or necessarily the best approach.
• New Directions? Informed by social science research and new capabilities afforded by technology, some public interest lawyers are finding new ways to think about addressing the unmet legal needs in their societies.

Register for this event