ABSTRACT
I am not a lawyer, nor even a student of law. But I was, once, a 19-year-old college student tutoring inmates in a correctional facility. Past the metal detectors, I learned three things in fairly rapid succession. Firstly, the women for whom I served as a tutor were perfectly capable of learning mathematics, especially with the right visuals and metaphors. Secondly, despite this, many of the women did not believe they could learn fractions and were not sure why they would need to. They struggled not due to issues of ability but because what I was teaching seemed irrelevant. And third, many incarcerated people are functionally illiterate. These three realisations are excellent examples of the subject of this chapter: the role of pedagogy and learning psychology in making legal systems accessible—that is, comprehensible—to expert lawyers and other non-expert users.
