This interactive session reimagines pro bono by exploring how youth legal capability can be cultivated as a foundation for engaging in social problems and advancing sustainable access to justice. Across many societies, limited legal literacy remains a systemic barrier for young people seeking to navigate legal systems and respond to pressing social issues.

Moving beyond traditional reactive legal aid models, this session examines how pro bono lawyers, educators, and civil society actors can collaborate to build legal capability through school-based justice education and community engagement.

Drawing on diverse initiatives—including ongoing pro bono legal education with pre-teens in Japan, the nationwide empowerment movement sparked by Kodomo Roppo, clinical legal education practices in Asia, and cross-border human rights dialogue projects with high school students—the session explores how empathy, legal reasoning, and civic agency can be integrated.

Through an experiential case exercise and structured reflection, participants will examine how legal knowledge, practical reasoning skills, and social awareness enable young people not only to understand injustice, but to engage with it constructively. By shifting the focus toward preventive and capability-based access to justice, the session proposes a scalable and collaborative model for youth legal empowerment across Asia.

Jefferson Plantilla

Human Rights Educator

Jimmy Hsu

Educator, National Fongshan Senior Industrial Vocational High School

Matt Lin

Teacher, National Fongshan Senior Industrial Vocational High School

Soichiro Yamasaki

PhD student, University of Tokyo