Vol. 17 No. 33 (2026): Precarious dwelling. Everyday practices, caring relations, and meaning-making processes
Articles

Legal Aid at the Margins: Realizing Rights for People Experiencing Homelessness in Italy

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  • Maria Chiara Pedroni
Maria Chiara Pedroni
Free University of Bozen, Italy
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/smp-17084

Published 2026-08-04

Keywords

  • homelessness,
  • access to justice,
  • legal aid,
  • civil registration,
  • citizenship

How to Cite

Pedroni, M. C. (2026). Legal Aid at the Margins: Realizing Rights for People Experiencing Homelessness in Italy. SocietàMutamentoPolitica, 17(33), 95–106. https://doi.org/10.36253/smp-17084

Copyright (c) 2026 Maria Chiara Pedroni

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

Legal aid is widely recognised as a key mechanism for enabling access to justice, however its inherent ambivalences and structural limitations have been highlighted in the literature. This paper explores how access to rights is enacted in everyday practice through a qualitative study of a volunteer-based organisation of “street lawyers” operating in Italy, which provides free legal aid to people experiencing homelessness. Drawing on volunteers’ accounts of their everyday practices, role interpretations, and encounters with institutional and structural barriers, the study examines how legal protection is enacted in practice, and how it both reveals and responds to the tensions shaping access to rights at the margins of citizenship. The findings underscore the relevance of approaches oriented towards the strengthening of rights as key levers for countering social exclusion and promoting substantive citizenship. The experiences of SL demonstrate that legal aid plays a significant role not only in relation to judicial outcomes, but also through its functions of recognition, visibility, and the restoration of voice to marginalised individuals.

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