Legal care and volunteer paralegals: the moral economy of state-making in Sierra Leone

Justice reform in fragile and post-conflict contexts increasingly relies on community-based intermediaries to make legal institutions accessible. This article examines volunteer paralegals in Sierra Leone and develops legal care as an analytical lens for their relational and interpretive labour. Drawing on 65 interviews, field observation and documentary analysis, the article shows how paralegals mediate disputes, accompany clients, translate legal norms and introduce procedural restraint across statutory, customary, administrative and community forums. Rather than simply extending the state, paralegals make plural justice settings more navigable, credible and responsive. Yet, this work is performed from positions of material precarity, sustained through stipends, donor funding and moral commitment rather than secure public employment. Legal care thus reveals how voluntarism functions as a technology of state-making: a moral economy of duty and service embedded within a political economy that separates frontline responsibility from frontline security. Reframing access to justice through this lens highlights the dependence of contemporary state-making on precarious civic labour and raises questions about who bears responsibility for sustaining care.