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Yes, I Can: Subjective Legal Empowerment, Martin Gramatikov, Robert B. Porter

Martin Gramatikov

This paper explores critically the notion of legal empowerment and suggests that the currently employed approaches lead to vague concepts which evade measurement and lend little programmatic guidance. Our thesis is that legal empowerment should be sought not in the process of providing legal solutions but in the subjective self-belief that a person posses and can mobilize the necessary resources, competencies and energies to solve particular problem of legal nature. This model rejects the existence of an overall quantity of legal empowerment. People’s beliefs in their ability to solve legal problems differ by type of problem, distribution of power in …