Activities
MCLE: Creating a Prison to University Pipeline: Prison Education and the New "Clean Slate" Laws
2/7/2023
5:00:00 PM to 7:00:00 PM
UCI Law
Sponsored by Orange County Bar Association, this Continuing Legal Education (CLE) also satisfies the "Elimination of Bias" requirement.
Creating a Prison to University Pipeline: Prison Education and the New "Clean Slate" Laws will provide an overview of LIFTED (Leveraging Inspiring Futures Through Education), a new University of California, Irvine initiative offering a Bachelor of Arts degree (BA) to incarcerated students, and will address key legal policy issues facing incarcerated students, in particular, access to federal financial aid in and after prison. This CLE will also provide a review of the new and existing “clean slate” laws which help individuals expunge their criminal records after their release from prison. UCI Criminology and Law Professor and Director of LIFTED Keramet Reiter; UCI Clinical Professor of Law and Criminal Justice Clinic Director Katie Tinto; and Hector Cervantes, Program Director, UCI Underground Scholars Initiative, will discuss these issues, address audience questions, and host a reception afterwards for further engagement. Nahal Kazemi, Senior Counsel at Keller/Anderle LLP will moderate the discussion. This CLE is also supported by the Orange County Public Defender, and Public Defender Martin F. Schwartz plans to attend.
There will be a reception following the CLE from 6 - 7 pm in the Law Library's California Room.
Thank you to all our sponsors:
Criminal Defense Association of San Diego | Federal Public Defender's Office for the Central District of California | Harvard Law School Association of OC | Harvard Law School Women's Alliance | Orange County Alternate Defender (Frank Davis) | Orange County Asian American Bar Association | Orange County Bar Association | Orange County Criminal Defense Bar Association | Orange County Korean American Bar Association | Orange County Lavender Bar Association | Orange County Public Defender and Public Defender Martin F. Schwarz | Thurgood Marshall Bar Association | UCI Anteaters-in-Law | Underground Scholars Initiative | Vietnamese American Bar Association of Southern California
For questions, please contact UCI Law Events at (949) 824-0197 or events@law.uci.edu.
3/31/2022
3:00:00 PM to 6:00:00 PM
Recent events have made ensuring access to justice more challenging than ever before. And it’s never been more critical.
Victoria Law Foundation and UCI Law Civil Justice Research Initiative invite you to the International Access to Justice Forum 2022.
Hear from leading experts from Australia, the United States, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom on contemporary access to justice issues.
Day 1:
- Legal tech and access to justice [Video]
- Deregulation of the legal profession [Video]
- Making administrative data smarter [Video]
Day 2:
- Legal need, empowerment and older people [Video]
- Culturally appropriate service design and delivery [Video]
- Courts and COVID-19 [Video]
Day 3:
- Climate change and legal need [Video]
- The role of legal education in access to justice [Video]
- Looking to the future - big ideas from leaders in access to justice [Video]
When:
Australia: 30, 31 March and 1 April
9am to 12pm (AEDT)
United States: 29, 30 and 31 March
West Coast 3pm to 6pm
East Coast 6pm to 9pm
All sessions will be held via Zoom. We will send you a link before the event.
Cost: Free - registration essential
3/30/2022
3:00:00 PM to 6:00:00 PM
Recent events have made ensuring access to justice more challenging than ever before. And it’s never been more critical.
Victoria Law Foundation and UCI Law Civil Justice Research Initiative invite you to the International Access to Justice Forum 2022.
Hear from leading experts from Australia, the United States, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom on contemporary access to justice issues.
Day 1:
- Legal tech and access to justice [Video]
- Deregulation of the legal profession [Video]
- Making administrative data smarter [Video]
Day 2:
- Legal need, empowerment and older people [Video]
- Culturally appropriate service design and delivery [Video]
- Courts and COVID-19 [Video]
Day 3:
- Climate change and legal need [Video]
- The role of legal education in access to justice [Video]
- Looking to the future - big ideas from leaders in access to justice [Video]
When:
Australia: 30, 31 March and 1 April
9am to 12pm (AEDT)
United States: 29, 30 and 31 March
West Coast 3pm to 6pm
East Coast 6pm to 9pm
All sessions will be held via Zoom. We will send you a link before the event.
Cost: Free - registration essential
3/29/2022
3:00:00 PM to 6:00:00 PM
Recent events have made ensuring access to justice more challenging than ever before. And it’s never been more critical.
Victoria Law Foundation and UCI Law Civil Justice Research Initiative invite you to the International Access to Justice Forum 2022.
Hear from leading experts from Australia, the United States, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom on contemporary access to justice issues.
Day 1:
- Legal tech and access to justice [Video]
- Deregulation of the legal profession [Video]
- Making administrative data smarter [Video]
Day 2:
- Legal need, empowerment and older people [Video]
- Culturally appropriate service design and delivery [Video]
- Courts and COVID-19 [Video]
Day 3:
- Climate change and legal need [Video]
- The role of legal education in access to justice [Video]
- Looking to the future - big ideas from leaders in access to justice [Video]
When:
Australia: 30, 31 March and 1 April
9am to 12pm (AEDT)
United States: 29, 30 and 31 March
West Coast 3pm to 6pm
East Coast 6pm to 9pm
All sessions will be held via Zoom. We will send you a link before the event.
Cost: Free - registration essential
3/7/2022
12:00:00 PM to 1:00:00 PM
401 E. Peltason Drive, Suite 1000, Irvine, CA 92697-8000
The Civil Justice Research Initiative welcomes Kathryne Young, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, to present, "The Justice Gap Landscape: Which Americans are at Greatest Risk for Everyday Civil Justice Problems, and What Does This Mean for Access to Justice?"
Abstract
The U.S. access to justice crisis is dire. The World Justice Project, which measures 139 countries on a variety of metrics, ranks the United States as number 126 out of 139 in its accessibility and affordability of civil justice. In 2021, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland announced the re-reestablishment of the DOJ Office for Access to Justice, promising to expand research on how “to close the gap between the need for, and the availability of, quality legal assistance.” The same year, a report by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences announced, “[W]e simply do not know enough about who faces civil justice issues, [and] which issues they face.” More detailed mapping of the access to justice landscape is crucial to closing the civil justice gap in the U.S.
This Article uses data from a representative sample of over 3,635 U.S. residents in 2021 to conduct the most granular analysis to date of the demographic characteristics associated with civil justice problems. We shed new light on the scope of inequities in everyday civil justice experiences and point to key paths of law and policy intervention in solving the U.S. civil justice crisis. Previous work focuses on how race, gender, age, and class affect a layperson’s chance of encountering a civil justice challenge. In addition to examining these important characteristics, we include several new characteristics: queerness, physical disability, rurality, parental status, and experiences of trauma. We demonstrate that these new characteristics are significant predictors of civil justice problems—both independent from, and in addition to, the characteristics that previous access to justice research has established as crucial.
Known predictors of civil justice problems also become more salient when they intersect with other factors. We illustrate that large civil justice disparities emerge even between people who “look the same” according to typical metrics. We present evidence for previously unrecognized gaps in civil justice needs, the most striking of which include a queer justice gap and a trauma justice gap. This Article makes the empirical case that to shrink the U.S. civil justice gap, legal and policy interventions must consider characteristics that—until now—have rarely been part of the access to justice conversation.
About Kathryne Young
Professor Kathryne M. Young, JD, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Sociology Department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, an Affiliated Scholar at the American Bar Foundation, and an adjunct Professor of Law at Western New England School of Law. A sociologist and legal scholar, Professor Young investigates the social mechanisms that create and maintain inequalities and perpetuate power relationships in law-related contexts and legal institutions. Her work has been published in the Harvard Law Review, California Law Review, Law & Society Review, Social Forces, and other journals, and has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court and Washington State Supreme Court. She currently serves as Associate Editor of Law & Society Review.
About the CJRI Access to Justice Colloquium
Civil legal problems are increasingly prevalent in everyday life, but access to information, expertise, and assistance in resolving these problems remains uneven. The UCI Law Civil Justice Research Initiative welcomes several leading scholars whose research addresses various dimensions of the access to justice crisis.
In-person attendance limited to UCI faculty/staff/students. Events will be streamed by Zoom for remote participation. A link to view the article will be provided upon registration.
2/14/2022
12:00:00 PM to 1:00:00 PM
401 E. Peltason Drive, Suite 1000, Irvine, CA 92697-8000
The Civil Justice Research Initiative welcomes Roger Michalski, Professor of Law at The University of Oklahoma College of Law, to present, "The Pro Se Gender Gap."
Abstract
This article is the first to identify, name, and empirically measure the pro se gender gap. Drawing on a massive dataset of all federal civil dockets spanning 10 years, it finds a 2-to-1 gender imbalance. For every federal female pro se litigant there are two males. This finding is robust and stable. It holds true for plaintiffs, defendants, and other parties. It is also true across most subject areas, across time, across length of litigation, and across states, districts, and circuits. The study excludes prisoner-rights and habeas petitions (including them would widen the gender gap even further).
This gender gap reveals a troubling disparity in who has effective access to justice, whose stories are heard, who shapes the development of the law, and whose rights are vindicated by federal courts. Labeling and measuring the pro se gender gap also provides a benchmark to test the efficacy of future policy interventions.
As such, the article lays the empirical foundations for a new wave of doctrinal work on the procedural foundations and consequences of gender disparities. It also provides a methodology that can be extended to study litigation gender disparities in state courts, tribal courts, arbitrations, and administrative proceedings.
About Roger Michalski
Professor Roger Michalski teaches courses on civil procedure, complex litigation, and conflict of laws. His recent scholarship has focused on the effects of modifying diversity jurisdiction, lessons from the opioid litigation, and divergent views on procedural values. Professor Michalski was admitted to the California Bar in 2011. He is a native German speaker.
About the CJRI Access to Justice Colloquium
Civil legal problems are increasingly prevalent in everyday life, but access to information, expertise, and assistance in resolving these problems remains uneven. The UCI Law Civil Justice Research Initiative welcomes several leading scholars whose research addresses various dimensions of the access to justice crisis.
In-person attendance limited to UCI faculty/staff/students. Events will be streamed by Zoom for remote participation. A link to the paper will be sent to registrants.
2/7/2022
12:00:00 PM to 1:00:00 PM
401 E. Peltason Drive, Suite 1000, Irvine, CA 92697-8000
The UCI Law Civil Justice Research Initiative and Center for Empirical Research on the Legal Profession welcome Margaret Hagan, Lecturer in Law and Executive Director of the Legal Design Lab, Stanford Law School, to present, "Justice Innovation: New Methods to Improve Access to the Courts."
About Margaret Hagan
Margaret Hagan is the Executive Director of the Legal Design Lab and a lecturer at Stanford Institute of Design (the d.school). She was a fellow at the d.school from 2013-2014, where she launched the Program for Legal Tech & Design, experimenting in how design can make legal services more usable, useful & engaging. She teaches a series of project-based classes, with interdisciplinary student groups tackling legal challenges through user-focused research and design of new legal products and services. She also leads workshops to train legal professionals in the design process, to produce client-focused innovation. Margaret graduated from Stanford Law School in June 2013. She served as a student fellow at the Center for Internet & Society and president of the Stanford Law and Technology Association. While a student, she built the game app Law Dojo to make studying for law school classes more interactive & engaging. She also started the blog Open Law Lab to document legal innovation and design work. Margaret holds an AB from the University of Chicago, an MA from Central European University in Budapest, and a PhD from Queen’s University Belfast in International Politics.
About the CJRI Access to Justice Colloquium
Civil legal problems are increasingly prevalent in everyday life, but access to information, expertise, and assistance in resolving these problems remains uneven. The UCI Law Civil Justice Research Initiative welcomes several leading scholars whose research addresses various dimensions of the access to justice crisis.
In-person attendance limited to UCI faculty/staff/students. Events will be streamed by Zoom for remote participation.
1/31/2022
12:00:00 PM to 1:00:00 PM
The Civil Justice Research Initiative welcomes Albert Yoon, Professor and Michael J. Trebilcock Chair in Law and Economics at University of Toronto Faculty of Law, to present, "Voting with One's Feet: How Students Rank Law Schools" (with Jesse Rothstein, UC Berkeley).
Abstract
Education is a credence good. While the virtues of education are widely embraced, its qualities are difficult to discern, even among its recipients. The sizeable and increasing cost of tuition – as in the case of U.S. law schools – only add to the stakes. In response, law school rankings have emerged, with the purported goal to help students make more informed choices. While these rankings have generated both interest and debate, an important question has remained unanswered: how do prospective law students perceive these schools?
Drawing upon data provided by the Law School Admissions Council (LSAC), we analyze the universe of law school applications for the period 1989 through 2017, creating a revealed preference ranking of law schools based solely on where applicants choose to matriculate given offers of admissions. We find that applicants strongly prefer Yale, Stanford, and Harvard, but do not draw such sharp distinctions among schools outside of the top 25. For all but the very top schools, we cannot rule out that schools adjacent in the rankings are equally preferred by admitted students. We also separately analyze the application, admission, and matriculation stages of the law school matching process. We find that applicants apply broadly, but that admissions and matriculation decisions hew closely to academic indicators.
Our revealed preference rankings resemble those of the U.S. News law rankings among the top 20 but bear little resemblance for the remaining schools. Our rankings offer a compelling alternative to commercial rankings, which are opaque and highly manipulatable. Our analyses also highlight the limitations of ordinal rankings, which by themselves can suggest meaningful differences where none exist, even among prospective law students.
About Albert Yoon
Albert Yoon holds the Michael J. Trebilcock Chair in Law and Economics.
Albert received his undergraduate degree from Yale and his law and doctoral (political science) degrees from Stanford. During law school, he was the senior articles editor of the Stanford Law Review. After graduation, he clerked for the Hon. R. Guy Cole of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and was a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research at U.C. Berkeley. Before joining the Faculty of Law, Albert was professor of law at Northwestern University, during which he was a Law and Public Affairs Fellow at Princeton University and a Russell Sage Visiting Scholar in New York City. Albert was Associate Dean - Research and Curriculum for the 2018-20 academic years.
Albert examines labor markets within and outside the legal profession. He has published in the Chicago, Stanford, and Virginia law reviews; and the Annals of Applied Statistics, Journal of Law & Economics, Journal of Theoretical Politics, among others. He is a recipient of the Ronald H. Coase Prize for best article in Law and Economics and a member of the American Law Institute. His recent scholarship focuses on legal ethics, and applications of machine learning and natural language processing to law.
Beyond his academic career, Albert is co-founder of Blue J Legal, the company behind Tax Foresight and Employment Foresight: the next generation of legal research tools that harness the power of artificial intelligence to provide instant and comprehensive answers in complex areas of tax, labor, and employment law.
About the CJRI Access to Justice Colloquium
Civil legal problems are increasingly prevalent in everyday life, but access to information, expertise, and assistance in resolving these problems remains uneven. The UCI Law Civil Justice Research Initiative welcomes several leading scholars whose research addresses various dimensions of the access to justice crisis.
1/24/2022
12:00:00 PM to 1:00:00 PM
The Civil Justice Research Initiative welcomes Rebecca Sandefur, Professor at ASU's T. Denny Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics to present, "Access to Justice and Regulatory Reform."
Around the country, states are experimenting or exploring experimenting with changes to rules about who can make money from the practice of law and who can deliver legal services directly to the public. A common rationale is that these changes will expand access to justice. This presentation will review some of these developments and the empirical evidence about their potential and achieved impact on access to justice. Spoiler alert: these changes are early and the evidence base is thin. However, future architects of these efforts can benefit from some of the lessons already learned, if their goal is indeed expanding access to justice.
Please note that due to current campus guidance regarding COVID-19, this event will be remote only.
About Rebecca Sandefur
Rebecca L. Sandefur investigates access to civil justice from every angle -- from how legal services are delivered and consumed, to how civil legal aid is organized around the nation, to the role of pro bono, to the relative efficacy of lawyers, nonlawyers and digital tools as advisers and representatives, to how ordinary people think about their justice problems and try to resolve them. She is Professor in the School of Social and Family Dynamics at Arizona State University and Faculty Fellow at the American Bar Foundation, where she founded and leads the Access to Justice Research Initiative.
Her public service includes her appointment by the Supreme Court of Utah to the state's Office of Legal Services Innovation, her role as Co-Vice Chair of California's Closing the Justice Gap Working Group, and her appointment by the Supreme Court of Arizona to the Arizona Commission on Access to Justice.
In 2013, Sandefur was The Hague Visiting Chair in the Rule of Law. In 2015, she was named Champion of Justice by the National Center for Access to Justice. In 2018, she was named a MacArthur Fellow for her work on inequality and access to justice. In 2020, she received the National Center for State Court's Warren E. Burger Award. She is currently Editor of Law & Society Review.
About the CJRI Access to Justice Colloquium
Civil legal problems are increasingly prevalent in everyday life, but access to information, expertise, and assistance in resolving these problems remains uneven. The UCI Law Civil Justice Research Initiative welcomes several leading scholars whose research addresses various dimensions of the access to justice crisis.
Thinking About Law & Accessing Civil Justice: Legal Consciousness, Dispute Processing, and Civil Legal Needs Today
2/7/2020
2:30:00 PM to 4:00:00 PM
401 East Peltason Drive Irvine, CA 92697-8000
Problems with civil legal implications are incredibly common in everyday life. Yet only a fraction of individuals who experience a civil legal problem will engage legal actors or institutions to address it. While some individuals are able to obtain satisfying and just outcomes without recourse to law, others are not. How do individuals’ knowledge and beliefs about law and legal institutions influence their behavior? How are these beliefs formed? What does this tell us about things we can do to enhance access to civil justice? This conference will bring together leading scholars to address these questions about how individuals think about law and the implications for access to civil justice. The conference will include several paper workshopping sessions, followed by a public panel presentation and reception. Papers presented at the conference will be eligible for inclusion in a symposium issue of the UCI Law Review.
Presenters
- Monica Bell, Associate Professor of Law, Yale Law School
- Tonya Brito, Jefferson Burrus-Bascom Professor of Law, University of Wisconsin School of Law
- Sean Farhang, Elizabeth Josselyn Boalt Professor of Law, UC Berkeley School of Law
- Hugh McDonald, Principal Researcher, Victoria Law Foundation, Melbourne, Australia
- Emily Ryo, Professor of Law and Sociology, USC Gould School of Law
- Rebecca Sandefur, Professor, School of Social and Family Dynamics, Arizona State University, Faculty Fellow, American Bar Foundation
- Emily Taylor Poppe, Assistant Professor of Law, UCI Law
- Kathryne Young, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Massachusetts-Amherst
Guest Speaker Series: Attorney Richard Bridgford
9/25/2019
5:30:00 PM to 6:30:00 PM
401 East Peltason Drive Irvine, CA 92697-8000
Richard Bridgford, founder and managing partner of a Newport Beach litigation law firm, draws upon his experience and his representation of hundreds of victims of the 2017 Las Vegas shooting to discuss how litigation can be an effective public policy tool for the adoption of federal laws mandating background checks and an assault weapons ban.
A presentation of the Civil Justice Research Initiative and the UCI Law Guest Speaker Series
CJRI | Ethics in Arbitration Symposium
4/26/2019
8:45:00 AM to 5:30:00 PM
UCI Division of Continuing Education
510 E. Peltason Dr., Irvine, CA 92697
Leading scholars, practitioners and arbitrators will talk about ethical issues in domestic arbitration including conflicts of interest, competency, credentialing and mandatory arbitration.
Keynote Speaker:
Carrie Menkel-Meadow
UCI School of Law
The Civil Justice Research Initiative explores, through interdisciplinary, academically-based and independent research, how the civil justice system can be made more available to everyone seeking relief.
CJRI Advisory Board Meeting
2/9/2019
8:30:00 AM to 12:30:00 PM
UCI School of Law
Meeting of the Civil Justice Research Initiative Advisory Board.