This chapter investigates the global access to justice crisis, where approximately 1.4 billion people worldwide have unmet civil or administrative justice needs despite living in functioning legal systems. Through an analysis of data from multiple countries including across North America, South America, Europe, and Asia, the chapter demonstrates that individuals with legal problems often struggle to access adequate assistance. Unrepresented litigants face substantial disadvantages without legal support, including, losing custody of children, facing eviction, and experiencing asset seizure.

Four factors are exacerbating this crisis: growing societal complexity, which creates increasingly intricate legal procedures; overprofessionalization of the legal community; systemic bias favoring institutional plaintiffs; and the fundamental language gap separating laypeople from lawyers. Addressing this crisis is imperative for two primary reasons: fairness and social costs. The chapter proposes that legal AI systems represent public goods, similar to courts and schools, requiring coordinated investment to democratize access to justice.

The language gap is a fundamental barrier preventing unrepresented litigants from understanding their legal rights and defenses. The chapter identifies three components: open texture, which reflects the inherent ambiguity and vagueness of natural language; legalese, characterized by its specialized vocabulary and structural peculiarities; and the abstraction of legal predicates, which require translation between everyday facts and legal concepts.

The analysis demonstrates how legal language functions as a distinct system where common words acquire uncommon meanings, precision conflicts with clarity, and flexible terms create interpretive challenges.

Recent advances in large language models offer promising tools for bridging this gap by providing translation capabilities between legal language and ordinary discourse; however, significant challenges remain for certain implementations regarding accuracy, hallucination risks, and unauthorized practice of law restrictions.

Chapter 2 describes how Christian and Muslim encounters in Dar es Salaam have been shaped by Tanganyika’s/Tanzania’s colonial and postcolonial histories and by related (individual and collective) memories of religious and educational differences. I argue that especially the ‘past-oriented narratives’ of Islamic activists and media actors have become emblematic of the ways in which Muslims perceive their position and status in the wake of globalisation and the market economy. I show that a focus on specific historical events has sustained the moral feeling among Muslims that they are systematically denied access to education and positions of power in contemporary Tanzania. Furthermore, the ‘language gap’ that resulted from Tanzania’s post-independence language policy in education has reinforced the growing popularity of church-run schools in the stratified educational landscape, where a good command of English becomes a condition for success.