ALF was started in March, 2000, by a collective of lawyers with the belief that there was a need for an alternative practice of law. We recognize that a practice of law is inherently political. We are committed to a practice of law which will respond to issues of social and economic injustice.

Over the past few years ALF has grown from being a legal service provider to becoming a space that integrates alternative lawyering with critical research, alternative dispute resolution, pedagogic interventions and more generally maintaining sustained legal interventions in various social issues.  We are also commited to an inter disciplinary interrogation of the law using creative forms.


ALF perceives itself simultaneously as a space that provides qualitative legal services to marginalized groups, as an autonomous research institution with a strong interdisciplinary approach working with practitioners from other fields, as a public legal resource using conventional and unconventional forms of creating access to information, as a centre for generating quality resources that will make interventions in legal education and training, and as finally a platform to enable collaborative and creative models of knowledge production.