Clinic Explores Citizen Participation in Lawmaking at Parliamentary Conference

Members of Yale Law School’s Governance Innovation Clinic participated in ParlAmericas’s Second Annual Gathering of the Open Parliament Network.

Published originally on the Yale Law School Blog.

Gabby Capone (JD/MBA ’19) and Aprille Knox (Jackson ’17) attend the Second Annual Gathering of the Open Parliament Network in San Jose, Costa Rica, where they represented Yale Law School’s Governance Innovation Clinic during two days of discussion on transparency, citizen engagement, and access to information in government. Photo Courtesy: Yale Law School

Members of Yale Law School’s Governance Innovation Clinic recently participated in ParlAmericas’s Second Annual Gathering of the Open Parliament Network. The event, which took place from March 15–18, 2017 in San Jose, Costa Rica, focused on strengthening ties between citizens and their legislatures. It featured more than 70 members of parliament as well as civil society representatives from across the Western hemisphere.

The conference began on a sobering note, as a panelist cited a recent Barometro Latinoamericano poll, stating: “A majority of citizens do not feel adequately represented by their government.”* This statement came backed by statistics from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (

OECD) showing that worldwide, only 40% of citizens trust their governments. In the U.S. alone, only 19% of citizens say they can trust the federal government to do what is right (Pew, 2015). This trend underpinned two days of workshops addressing transparency and legitimacy issues.

Yale’s clinic team, directed by Florence Rogatz Visiting Clinical Professor of Law Beth Simone Noveck ’97, was invited to facilitate a workshop on “smart parliaments,” leading participants in an interactive discussion on techniques for enabling inclusive and innovative legislative processes. Building on their semester-long work investigating effective citizen engagement models, the team sought to explore engagement and technology solutions as they relate to the citizen trust crisis from the perspective of parliamentarians.

The citizen engagement team represents one of multiple teams working on an array of topics within the Governance Innovation Clinic — all addressing the core issues of strengthening democratic institutions through legal and technological innovations that transform and improve governance. Other topics the clinic is working on include developing innovative anti-corruption mechanisms, providing data-driven legal services, and using digital technology to improve prisoner education.

“Clinic teams work to identify their client’s core problem and then to design an actionable solution,” said Gabriella Capone (JD/MBA ’19), who presented at the conference with teammate Aprille Knox (Jackson ’17). “For us, it entails helping our client to design a citizen engagement system to address citizen distrust and apathy. We’ve been fortunate to engage with leading thinkers, including Professor Noveck, in an emerging civic space that uses crowdsourced citizen insights in lawmaking processes — known as Crowdlaw.”

Read the full blog post here.