If Lived Experience Could Speak: A Method for Repairing Epistemic Violence in Law and the Legal Academy

Terrell Carter grew up only a stone’s throw from Drexel University, the institution of higher learning where the other coauthor of this Article, Rachel López, would find her academic home years later. Even as a child, Terrell remembers feeling like other institutions that were miles away, like State Correctional Institution Graterford where he would spend most of his adult life, were much more proximate. Paradoxically, he would later come to learn that behind the walls of institutions like Drexel, academics like Rachel would develop ideas and theory that would shape his fate and define his existence behind other walls. Through Participatory Law Scholarship (PLS)—legal scholarship written in collaboration with those without formal legal training, but expertise in law’s injustice through lived experience—Terrell and Rachel seek to dismantle the walls upon walls that divide the ideals of law from the lived experience of it. Building from the experience of coauthoring Redeeming Justice, their award-winning article that contributed to the liberation of Terrell less than a year after its publication, this Article explores the role that participatory methods in legal scholarship can play in repairing the epistemic harm done by law and by academics to the most marginalized in our society. PLS does this by centering experiential knowing as a source of legal expertise so that those for whom the law is most consequential can see themselves reflected in it and know that they are and can be a part of the making of legal meaning. PLS strives to ensure that people who are formally educated in the law are not the only ones who are able to engage in legal scholarship and the development of legal theory. This approach to legal scholarship is grounded in the belief that the experience of being marginalized by the law uniquely positions someone to critique it. Ultimately, PLS seeks to democratize knowledge production by validating alternative ways of knowing what the law is and what changes are needed for it to realize its full potential.