The starting point for legal empowerment is using the law to get concrete solutions to specific lived experiences of injustice.
But it doesn’t end there. Around the world, legal empowerment organizations are experimenting with ways to translate grassroots efforts to address specific rights violations into broader systemic reforms that advance justice for everyone. These transformative changes address the underlying causes of injustice by creating new rights and stopping patterns of abuse. Legal empowerment methods offer powerful pathways to activate existing rights and turn the sometimes rusty wheels within public institutions. This can
include a range of strategies: joint or collective cases that bundle multiple grievances together, litigation, direct action campaigns,
collaboration with state agencies, and more. The creative use of legal and political strategies rooted in organizing makes legal empowerment well positioned to engage the courts, administrative agencies, and legislators. The political and institutional context in a particular place shapes opportunities for advancing change. As we experiment, we can compare notes to better understand what works, when, and why.

In 2018, the Grassroots Justice Network launched a collaborative effort to create a learning agenda for the field. The learning agenda focuses on the most pressing issues facing the global movement for grassroots justice – the frontiers where collective inquiry can generate new solutions to the challenges that keep us at night. Action research projects led by members of the Grassroots Justice Network across Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia are generating powerful insights on how legal empowerment strategies can build community power and achieve changes in laws and institutions that deepen democratic governance. This publication draws on insights from across the action research projects to illustrate pathways to systems change.