The self taught Chinese ‘barefoot lawyer’ Chen Guangcheng may not have followed the Chartered Institute of Legal Executive (CILEX) path to non-graduate legal qualification, but for me he’s a legal executive in spirit.
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Chen, who begins studying law the traditional way at New York Law School (NYU) this week, didn't experience any form of formal education until he was 13. Blinded by a fever when he was a baby, he would go on to become the first person in his family to attend university, where he studied massage and acupuncture – one of the only professions open to blind people in China.
On the quiet, though, Chen kept slipping off to law lectures – despite the fact that blind students weren’t allowed to graduate in the subject – and subsequently used the legal knowledge he had gleaned to help people back in his village.
With his family reading legal documents for him, Chen’s clients included a dwarf who had been refused a business licence because of his height and a family whose paranoid schizophrenic son had been classed as fully-functioning by the authorities...