With a constellation of high profile global thinkers and leaders, the Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor promised to reposition law and justice concerns at the centre of thinking on poverty alleviation. The Commission has succeeded in generating greater interest in the nexus between poverty, injustice and legal exclusion and is a welcome addition to the battle of ideas and concomitant battle over resources over how to raise the living standards of the poor and disadvantaged. However, this article, which analyzes the Commission's final report from the perspective of a legal empowerment practitioner, concludes that the Commission is an opportunity missed. The Commission's failure to properly tackle the political economy of reform and to justify its policy agenda with empirical data limits its value to the practitioner and will curtail its impact with policymakers.

The Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor has made a considerable contribution to the international development community by focusing attention on concrete legal needs of impoverished populations. As such, it constitutes a fine start for international, regional and domestic efforts to pull together a legal empowerment agenda that will directly benefit such groups. Nevertheless, the Commission's report falls short in key respects. It displays an inordinate faith in employing rational persuasion to grapple with a widespread problem it highlights – how to get self-interested politicians and other elites to forfeit their own advantage for the well-being of society. It is similarly stumbles in addressing how to best implement ambitious legal reforms, so that they have actual impact and do not simply exist on paper. And it does not reconcile the Commission's fundamentally top-down approach with an area of development that is bottom-up in nature. Going forward, it is important to build on the Commission's good start, but depart from its false and even counterproductive steps; the international community should instead draw on successful country-specific legal empowerment experience from diverse contexts. This features increased investment in civil society efforts to make the rule of law a reality, since such initiatives have a better track record than government-centered programs that mainly rely on elite good will. It more specifically involves enhanced long-term funding for domestic and international NGO efforts, both in the form of legal services for the disadvantaged and by integrating such services into broader socioeconomic development programs. The international community should also support impact-oriented applied research and move toward establishing a Millennium Development Goal for legal empowerment

Legal Empowerment of the Poor (LEP), which has recently been launched as a new conceptual and operational tool for poverty eradication, has attracted considerable attention in the face of claims that poverty persists partly because the poor do not enjoy legal rights or the power to exercise those rights. This essay provides a brief overview of the conceptual foundations of the LEP approach as reflected primarily in the main report of the Commission of Legal Empowerment of the Poor (CLEP). It thereafter critically examines the LEP's potential of promoting pro-poor governance and strengthening the protection and promotion of basic socio-economic and political rights of the poor. It argues that it is not only crucial to strengthen the theoretical underpinnings of the concept by recognizing the links between legal and political empowerment, but to also closely link the LEP with the general development experience so far.