Pune: Law is a subject which is interlinked with various other disciplines of social sciences like economics, political science, history and sociology. Society plays an important role in framing law. Law is made for the benefit of society and to keep a social control over the people. Law should not be used as a means to exploit the people and thus judges should give importance to social perspective while deciding the cases. One can give social justice only when one knows the various social issues prevailing in the society and this can be done only by interacting with the common people. Understanding law by interacting with the masses is the best way to learn law. By interacting with the masses one would be able to understand the problems they are going through and it would be easy to analyze and understand the graveness of problems they are facing and this would help in the effective application of law. This is called Lawyering with a socio-legal perspective.

Lawyering with a socio-legal perspective cannot be defined in words as it has a wider scope. Prof. Kalin (University of Bern) has defined socio-legal Lawyering in the most perfect way. He says, “Social justice lawyering is necessarily an activist lawyering which transforms the power relations and thus facilitates the assertions of rights and entitlement of the poor through legal process. The traditional legal aid is directed towards the protection of individuals in specific cases. It is intended to defend the poor but no efforts are made to encourage the formulation and effective enforcement of laws for the poor. In contrast, social justice lawyering goes much beyond the traditional legal assistance and looks towards becoming an effective resource in the empowerment of the impoverished. It focuses on social transformation through use of Law.”

HRLD [Human Rights and Law Defenders] is an NGO in Pune which works towards strengthening access to justice for the marginalized and vulnerable groups like women, children, dalits, prisoners and people living with HIV/AIDS through legal aid moment and judicial reforms and it also creates an interface between the citizens, police and judiciary to bring about a humane justice system. It conducts an Internship programme were all interns are given opportunities to interact with people suffering from various atrocities and through this method students are in a better position to understand law and to imply them in the future cases they will be dealing with. Through this initiative HRLD aims in bridging the gap between formal education and informal knowledge. HRLD deals with various socio-legal issues and it gives importance to right based perspective and it also gives free legal-aid to the deserving people in some cases.

While interning with HRLD I was given a chance to interact with an HIV/AIDS patient and some women into sex work attending a talk on prevention of HIV/AIDS. Interacting with them threw more knowledge on various problems the society is facing than those written in the books. I came to know how tough it is for an HIV/AIDS patient to survive in an orthodox society like ours. The patient told me how she and her family was shunned by all and how people avoided conversing with her and her daughter and to some extent even the close relatives avoided her and I was able to reach to a conclusion that our society is still ignorant about this serious disease. And through the other interacting session with the prostitutes I understood how much hatred the society has towards them and how illiterate they are and how people take advantage of that situation. These interactive sessions completely changed my perspective towards law. Earlier I used to think that learning law is all about mugging up section numbers and case laws and now I realize how important it is to understand law in the right sense by interacting with the victims, accused and most importantly to