Abstracts

Nóra Al Haider - Access to Online Legal Information: Beyond Generic Content

Natalia Antolak-Saper - The Use of Non-Lawyers and Technology to Assist Unrepresented Defendants: A Global Perspective

This presentation draws upon early findings from a qualitative study of stakeholders in Australia, Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom. It identifies key initiatives in these jurisdictions that seek to improve access to justice. These include community justice centres, in-court assistance such as the ‘McKenzie friend,’ and the use of virtual helpers generated by AI or similar technology. Drawing upon interviews with stakeholders, this presentation will outline the nature of the initiatives, their positive features, as well as challenges to their implementation or expansion while maintaining the quality of services. Some key lessons include the importance of regulatory reform and the need for a holistic approach.

Gilat Juli Bachar - Just Tort Settlements

The presentation will discuss my recent article which uses experimental data and private law theory to analyze the psychological dynamics of settlement. To what extent do NDAs matter for plaintiffs who consider settlement offers, and does it matter if such offers come from repeat wrongdoers? The Article uses quantitative data to illustrate the complex nature of plaintiffs’ settlement decisions, going beyond ordinary explanations of a desire to be made whole or to maximize payouts, and revealing instead that public and private law values are deeply intertwined with litigants’ resolution of tort disputes.

Swethaa Ballakrishnen, Ben Barton, Russell Pearce & Carole Silver - Training, Supporting, and Bolstering Subversive Lawyers and Lawyering

As legal professions around the world face a crossroads with technology and a worldwide access to justice crisis we highlight the role that subversive lawyers and subversive ways of lawyering can play in changing the practice and the entire field of legal services provision generally. We look at the ways subversive lawyering is (and, sadly, isn't) promoted and created in American law schools and the ways that a small c conservative profession can be forced/guided to a more subversive bent. Together, we discuss subversive lawyers and ways of lawyering to help think about context, site making, and experiences at the periphery, and bringing those experiences into the lawyering and legal services space.

Cayley Balser - A Community-Driven Approach to Regulatory Reform

Innovation for Justice (i4J), housed at the University of Arizona and the University of Utah, is the only legal innovation lab to design projects that leverage reg reform to legally empower underrepresented populations. Based on 4 years of research, i4J has developed an actionable, replicable framework for working with & within communities to stand up new reg reform innovations that increase access to legal services for community members. This presentation will discuss how that framework can be used to design, test, and launch initiatives leveraging reg reform to equip community justice workers to provide upstream, trauma-informed, limited-scope legal advice to the low-income community members they already serve.

Lester Bird - Taking Debt Cases out of the Shadows

This presentation sheds light on the growing issue of debt collection lawsuits in the US and their impact on marginalized communities by diving into 15 key research questions illustrated by state court data examples. The focus of this presentation is to establish core metrics for debt collection cases and present actionable recommendations to improve access to justice. This presentation aims to motivate attendees to examine court data and contribute to a growing community of researchers dedicated to highlighting the challenges of debt collection lawsuits and driving policymaker attention to this critical access to justice issue.

Sayid R. Bnefsi - Compensatory Preliminary Damages: Access to Justice as Corrective Justice

The access-to-justice movement broadly concerns the extent to which people have the ability to resolve legally actionable problems. To the extent that individuals seek resolution through civil litigation, they can be disadvantaged by their unmet need for legal services, particularly in high-stakes cases and complicated areas of law. In part, this is because legal services and litigation are not just expensive but can be cost-prohibitive, especially for indigent plaintiffs. As a result, people who lack the financial wherewithal to afford to bring claims based on their legal problems can be, in effect, priced out of litigation. This article proposes a novel legal intervention to this problem called “compensatory preliminary damages.”

Jérémy Boulanger-Bonnelly - Access to Person-Centred Dispute Resolution: The Potential of Lay Courts

In recent years, the discourse around access to justice has shifted towards person-centred justice. While this concept has led primarily to reforms in legal services that cater to private needs, such as legal information and advice, it has also been used to influence court reforms. In that context, this paper argues that the focus on individual needs that is central to person-centred justice must be balanced with the courts’ role in guiding the development of law and public policy. While this balance is not easy to achieve in practice, the paper argues that lay courts—local institutions led by part-time judges untrained in law—can centre dispute resolution on the person while protecting the justice system’s public function.

Larisa G. Bowman - Right-to-Counsel Reformism: An Abolitionist Critique of Civil Gideon in New York City Housing Court

Sixty years after the landmark decision Gideon v. Wainwright, low-income tenants facing eviction in New York City have a right to counsel in housing court. But a growing number of tenants entitled to assistance are appearing in housing court without representation. This crisis of representation reflects the reformism of the right to counsel when untethered from the tenant-led movement that won it. By failing to center the demands of tenants for housing justice, right to counsel has failed to move us closer to the abolition of eviction. Its implementation is a cautionary tale of the limitations of a rights-based framework dependent on lawyers and litigation to confront power and radically shift the relationship of poor people to their homes.

Natasha Brown - Law Schools and A2J: An inventive Approach Taken by One Canadian Law School

The University of Manitoba, Faculty of Law has made substantial efforts to address the unique challenges in access to justice faced by the urban, rural, northern, and remote regions of Manitoba. Under the leadership of a new Dean, the Faculty has been redesigned and repurposed to integrate access to justice into its core mission. The Faculty's Director of Access to Justice will address the four newly created faculty positions focused on enhancing access to justice. These portfolios include access to justice innovation, clinical education, Indigenous perspectives and program/professional development. The Director of A2J will also discuss the challenges faced, and the goals for the future as the work on access to justice continues to grow.

 
Jay Chalke & Diane D. Welborn - A Climate of Fairness

Climate change has resulted in displacement of people around the world. Extreme weather events are on the rise, whether they be droughts, floods, storms, wildfires or extreme heat. We have seen floods in Brazil, New Zealand, California, and Pakistan; earthquakes in Türkiye, Syria, China, and Indonesia; hurricanes along Atlantic coastlines; cyclones in India and Bangladesh; and bushfires in Australia. Despite being highly economically developed, Canada and the United States are not immune from this phenomenon. The recent tragic wildfires affecting Hawaii, along with Hurricane Hilary impacting California, have reinforced that weather patterns are changing and thus governments need to change as well.

 
Elizabeth Chambliss - Rural Legal Markets

Research on rural access to justice tends to appeal to a romantic conception of rural lawyers as trusted generalists who serve their communities through pro bono, low bono, and community service, and some characterize rural private practice as public interest work. Many commentators call for law school, bar, and government programs to attract law graduates to rural practice and at least fifteen states have implemented such programs. Yet we know relatively little about rural legal markets or the recipes for sustainable private practice in rural places. This mixed methods study investigates the contours of private practice in rural South Carolina and the role of private practitioners in serving underserved clients and communities.

 
Casey Chiappetta - Using Data to Push for Modern Courts

State civil court data is often widely inconsistent across jurisdictions and generally not accessible by those who need it to understand court problems and identify effective solutions. Until now. In this session, Pew will share lessons learned from working with civil courts to access and analyze their data to examine disparities across race and identify trends in filings and outcomes in debt collection and eviction cases—the top two drivers of civil court dockets—and how they're pushing courts towards a new standard of openness. Pew and its partners are working to drive policy change and push courts to open their data and pursue data-informed solutions to how these lawsuits are adjudicated.

 
Christine Cimini - Can Authentic Lay Lawyering and Democratically Structured Movement Lawyering Improve Civil Access-to-Justice?

This presentation looks beyond the traditional “access to lawyers” quandary and applies interpersonal dynamics that the philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò calls “elite capture” to civil law access-to-justice problems. Based on empirical evidence drawn from participant ethnographies, interviews, and content analysis of documents produced through FOIA litigation, we present two case studies to evaluate how each approach deals with “elite capture” and impacts access to justice. The first case study, Dignidad, is an experiment in lay advocacy that trains forced migrants for accreditation thereby authorizing them to represent others in immigration proceedings, trials, and appeals. Our examination found not only that the Dignidad lay advocates are a more-than-adequate substitute for the lack of competent lawyers representing immigrants but that they also exceed lawyers in terms of raw efficacy and the provision of enhanced client autonomy. The second case study examines lawyers’ engagement in democratically structured movement lawyering designed to end the immigration enforcement program known as Secure Communities (S-Comm). Anti S-Comm advocates provided lawyer legitimacy to a campaign built on loosely coupled, embedded, and highly democratic structures. We found this model provided effective and accountable representation to large groups and dampened the ill effects of elite capture. We conclude that Dignidad and the anti-S-Comm campaign represent important advances in access to justice challenges. These models provide a larger number of legal representatives and more accountable lawyers for groups of marginalized folks whose voices are not heard and interests are not adequately promoted through more traditional legal vehicles.

 
Toni Collins - From Crisis to Conflict: Access to Justice in a Post-Disaster Dispute Resolution System

Access to justice may be compromised after a significant disaster. The damage to and destruction of homes creates an enormous number of disputes which quickly overwhelm the normal dispute resolution processes and expose existing weaknesses in the system. This presentation examines post-disaster dispute resolution in New Zealand using the Canterbury earthquake sequence 2010/2011 as a case study, where, in a large number of cases, dispute resolution became a secondary disaster for victims. It explores how access to justice in a post-disaster setting can be addressed by the development of an efficient and effective dispute resolution system and its inclusion in a disaster preparedness strategy to enhance community resilience to disasters.

 
Logan Cornett , Jessica Bednarz, Lucy Ricca & James Teufel - Exploring New Data from IAALS’ Evaluation of Utah’s Regulatory Sandbox

Rigorous data collection and evaluation are critical in understanding whether Utah’s regulatory sandbox is meeting its stated goals. To that end, IAALS is acting as an independent third-party evaluator for the sandbox. This session will begin with a brief presentation of data and preliminary findings from IAALS' evaluation of Utah's regulatory sandbox, followed by a moderated panel discussion during which experts will weigh in on interpreting the results and identifying key lessons for successful consumer-centered legal regulation. Audience members would be invited to actively participate in the discussion, as well.

 
Kate Crowley Richardson, Katie Dilks, Tanina Rostain & Sacha Steinberger - Community Navigators on the Frontlines: Using Legal First Aid to Expand Access to Justice

Community navigators are a critical upstream component of a thriving legal ecosystem, and can help to narrow the Access to Justice gap for people experiencing poverty across the United States. In 2022, Legal Link, a California nonprofit, partnered with the Oklahoma Access to Justice Foundation and Georgetown Law to launch new community navigator programs in Oklahoma and South Carolina. This presentation will summarize the findings laid out in Legal Link’s recently released working paper on the critical role of community navigators. It will also discuss key learnings from the first year of the South Carolina and Oklahoma navigator programs, including a preliminary three-state comparative data analysis.

Scott Dodson - Why Do In-State Plaintiffs Invoke Diversity Jurisdiction?

The traditional rationale of federal diversity jurisdiction is to protect out-of-state parties from the risk of an appearance of state-court bias in favor of an in-state adversary. Yet a strikingly high percentage—more than 50%—of original domestic-diversity cases are filed by in-state plaintiffs. Drawing on docket data and an original dataset based on responses to a survey sent to more than 12,000 attorneys who represented in-state plaintiffs in domestic-diversity cases, this paper provides evidence to explain why these in-state plaintiffs are selecting federal diversity court.

Daria Fisher Page & Brian Farrell - Reframing Assessment of Rural Access to Justice: Developing New Measurements of Legal Infrastructure and Need

Our work explores the creation of more nuanced metrics for assessing rural access to justice – metrics which allow us to understand legal supply and demand as more than dichotomous, and instead as relative phenomena.  Our research looks at building metrics for (1) rurality, beginning with the Index of Relative Rurality; (2) supply, expanding Pruitt’s idea of “legal infrastructure”; and (3) demand, using social vulnerability indices from geography. The goals of the project are to deepen conversation about how we create metrics in the access to justice space and how we use them to identify locations/communities where interventions would be most effective.

Ellie Frazier - Community Paralegals and the Road to Professionalization

Much access to justice research demonstrates community paralegals’ efficacy in providing dispute resolution, human rights education, and legislative change. Yet less attention is paid to their evolving relationships with the state and civil society. This paper examines how mobilizing community paralegals pushes the boundaries of the legal profession in ways that both bolster and destabilize paralegal work. Using interviews from 18 community paralegal sites in South Africa, it illuminates their role in shaping their emergent profession. These processes are as much a story of surprising, complex, and contradictory relationships among paralegals, the state, and civil society groups as they are of providing access to justice to indigent groups.

Suzie Forell - Legal Need and Capability in Mental Health Settings

Mental health services consumers are vulnerable to legal issues, and yet the solutions lie beyond the expertise of those services. But what are the strengths of mental health practitioners and the challenges they face in identifying and responding to legal issues? This presentation reports on a project to support the design of health justice partnerships in mental health services, including a survey conducted with clinicians and peer support workers about the legal issues they see their consumers facing, and practitioners’ self-assessed strengths and the challenges in responding to these issues. In-depth health service-based legal needs assessments and service gap analyses were also conducted in three services.

David Freeman Engstrom & Graham Ambrose - Consumer Harm and Legal Services Reform

Galvanized by America’s access-to-justice crisis, states are actively liberalizing legal services markets by rewriting the rules that govern lawyers. Proponents and critics alike claim the same goal: protecting the public from harm. But scholars and regulators rarely ask obvious follow-up questions: What potential harms do consumers of legal services actually face? Why, and from what, do consumers need to be protected? And how best can governments implement protections? This paper offers a novel framework for conceptualizing consumer harm in American legal markets, thus offering new traction on longstanding questions around how, and how not, to undertake legal services reform.

Jona Goldschimdt - Do Federal Circuit Courts Provide Assistance to Self-Represented Litigants? A Review of Federal Circuits’ Website Resources

This paper examines whether – and to what extent – U.S. Circuit Courts' websites provide resources for self-represented litigants (SRLs). These might include dedicated links to forms, and explanations for how to file an appeal; descriptions of the courts’ policy on recruitment of counsel; handbooks for drafting briefs; information about obtaining transcripts; referral to pro bono and other legal services, and the like. The paper also addresses the question of whether the existence and the greater or lesser extent of such resources reflects each Circuits' general attitude toward SRLs as reflected in its caselaw.

Simon Goodrich - Scaling Impact: How to best use design and technology to drive long term change in the A2J sector

The presentation will focus on how to scale impact in the Access to Justice sector using technology and design. Simon will share his insights on the key traits required for successful, long term adoption of technology that works to solve problems and serve our communities. Using amica as an example, now the leading global family separation tool, the presentation will focus on what principles to consider when seeking to develop legal technology and what are the key considerations when building successful alliances for longer term change. It will cover how Legal Aid Boards and NGOs can best work with government and the private sector to develop legal products together, including how to best structure partnerships, roles and responsibilities.

Kate Gower  - Assessing the Value of Reddit Data for the Shift to Person-Centred Justice: An Interdisciplinary, Collaborative Approach by Legal and Data Science Scholars

This presentation describes how the team at the Justice Data and Design Lab identified the social media platform, Reddit, and particularly the subreddit “r/legaladvicecanada”, as a potential source of data on the everyday legal needs of people in British Columbia, Canada.  I will take attendees directly into our data and show how we are using cutting edge tools such as Latent Direchlet Allocation, interactive Intertopic Distance Maps and ChatGPT to analyze the data for insights into people’s everyday legal problems.

Bruce Green - Trial Courts' Role in Expanding Nonlawyers' Role

This presentation will explore trial courts’ potential role in expanding access to justice by authorizing nonlawyers to provide legal assistance in judicial proceedings. It will examine the relevant legal barriers and grounds for opposition as well as the utility of this approach.

Margaret Hagan - Paths toward Access to Justice at Scale

Pilots to increase access to justice are happening in local courts, legal aid groups, government agencies, and community groups around the globe. These innovative new local services, technologies, and policies aim to build people’s capability, reduce barriers to access, and improve the quality of justice people receive. They are often built with an initial short-term investment, to design the pilot and run it for a period. Most of them lack a clear plan to scale up to a more robust iteration, or to spread to other jurisdictions, or to sustain the program past the initial investment. This presentation presents a framework of theories of change for the justice system, and stakeholders' feedback on how to use them for impact.

Luz E. Herrera - Binational Legal Services Networks: The Need to Address Legal Needs of Immigrant Families

The paper discusses the legal needs of families who are separated by the U.S.-Mexico border due to immigration status and lack of identity. It proposes the development of a pilot network that helps to connect families in the U.S. and Mexico to the administrative and legal resources needed to establish identity and permit integration into the society they live in.

Bonnie Rose Hough, Judge Mark A. Juhas & Justice Laurie D. Zelon (ret.) - The New Judging:  Adapting to Today's Court Users

The vision of the traditional adversarial system of experienced attorneys on each side of a case presenting their evidence at trial is seldom the case in many courts. The work of judging must change in response to reflect this reality and improve the opportunity for substantive and procedural justice. This presentation will discuss those changes and challenges. Two experienced judges and a judicial administrator will review practices that support justice for self-represented litigants by encouraging engaged neutrality and clear communication. They will also consider recent research identifying challenges and next steps.

Claire Johnson Raba - Beyond Default Judgments: Lessons from California Debt Cases

In a project supported by The Pew Charitable Trusts, researchers examined more than 2.2 million debt collection claims in California over 11 years (2009-2020). Using big data analysis to identify and track longitudinal patterns in filing rates, documents filed, and outcomes in debt collection cases, researchers identified and coded normalized data points within complex and disaggregated data from 16 California counties – home to 80 percent of state’s residents – to tell the story of consumer participation and case dispositions. Looking beyond default judgments, this Study identifies how state court rules, civil court operations, and legal service delivery can be improved to halt the flood of one-sided litigation in debt collection cases.

Esset Kahsay & Katia Lallo - Increasing Access to Justice through a Bicultural Workforce

In 2021, Moonee Valley Legal Service established its Legal Concierge program. The program intended to disseminate legal information to public housing residents through young community leaders. Two years on the service has learned that an important step towards access to justice is to employ and embed the future leaders of the community they work to support at every level of the organisation. This presentation will discuss the program through a dialogue between Esset Kahsay, Legal Concierge, paralegal and community member, and Katia Lallo, legal service Manager. In doing so, it raises broader questions about what it means to sustainably establish a representative and responsive community legal service through a bicultural workforce.

Brittany Kauffman - Black Swans, Gray Rhinos, and Lessons on Access to Justice from the Pandemic

One of the key lessons of the pandemic is that we need to pay more attention to the gray rhinos that are headed our way with massive weight—and with great potential for impact. There are many gray rhinos looming, including climate change, technology, global conflict, and economic change. Like the pandemic, all of these have the potential for increasing civil legal problems in people’s lives and undermining access to justice. These events will become increasingly consequential, and we must collaborate on an international level to identify risks and respond to them. This session will highlight lessons learned and the critical need to forecast and prepare for future high-impact events.

Susan Leclercq & Frances Singleton - Exchanging Top-down for Bottom-up: A New Approach to Free Legal Advice for Women

In September 2021 the Amsterdam Law Hub opened the capital’s first free legal advice clinic for women, the Vrouwenrechtswinkel. The project has a dual purpose; closing the justice gap felt by Dutch women through high quality advice delivered to locations often; & improving the quality of education for law students. We will explore how we have achieved this through a combination of technology and inter-disciplinary training.  First, we focus on the platform we developed to collect anonymized insights into the problems faced by women, enabling a data-driven approach to A2J. Second, we share our best practices for combining multi-disciplinary student teams with skills & knowledge training to ensure a holistic approach to legal challenges.

Michelle Leering - Measuring What Matters: Challenges and Opportunities When Working across Disciplines to Increase Access to Justice through Health & Justice Approaches

Health justice partnerships provide fertile ground for seeding cross-disciplinary collaboration, early intervention approaches, client-centred problem-solving, and systemic advocacy to resolve and advance legal entitlements and human rights aligned with the social determinants and drivers of health. Engaging healthcare providers in this critical access to justice approach is strengthened when legal professionals develop new skills in evaluation and empirical research, the capacity for reflective practice, and ways to track efficiency, effectiveness, and impact. Based on a research study completed in 2021 that explored evaluation practices in four countries, I outline 22 themes – promising practices to help measure what matters.

Ji Li - Race, Gender, Class, or Judicial Fairness What Matters at the Entry Point of the U.S. Legal Service Market?

Using a randomized survey experiment, this study explores possible effects of race, gender, class, and perceived judicial fairness in the vast retail legal service market of the United States. The analyses focus on the entry point of the market, investigating whether and how these theoretically and practically important factors impact consumers’ responses to simulated social-media and online lawyer advertisements. This study finds both socioeconomic class and consumers’ perceived judicial fairness to be significantly associated with responsiveness to lawyer advertising. The findings contribute to ongoing debates about labor market discrimination, consumer discrimination, race and gender in the legal profession, and access to justice.

Ricardo Lillo - The Impact of Information and Communication Technologies on Access to Civil Justice in Chile: Learning from the Covid-19 Pandemic

In the area of civil justice, the main response of the Chilean justice system during the pandemic has been to expand the already significant technological infrastructure that the judiciary has achieved in recent decades. However, the intensive use of technology has not necessarily led to a reduction in barriers to access to justice or an improvement in the satisfaction of the population's prevailing legal needs. There is a lack of research on how technology has affected access to justice for ordinary people. This presentation analyses the preliminary findings of a three-year project that aimed to provide a diagnosis and evidence-based policy recommendations on the use of technology to improve access to civil justice in the Chilean context.

Alyx Mark - Pandemic Policymaking in State Supreme Courts: Implications for the Administration of Civil Justice

During the COVID-19 pandemic, state court leaders had to make choices about how to run their courts.  Some allowed jurisdictions to experiment with new procedures, while others centralized rules changes or offered a limited range of options.  These variations in approach raise questions about the barriers that may exist for courts that want to experiment with new procedures.  This article presents findings on the variation in state supreme courts’ approaches to directing procedural change during the pandemic and offers possible recommendations.  It also examines the impact of allowing courts to experiment with solutions to access to justice issues.

Milan Markovic - Generative AI and Everyday Legal Problems

Scholars have long predicted that artificial intelligence will transform the practice of law. With the advent of generative AI such as GPT-4, the future may now be at hand. Although generative AI is bound to make the corporate practice of law more efficient, its implications for everyday legal problems and access to justice are unclear. Generative AI can substitute for formal legal assistance in some situations and thereby lower transaction costs. While the public should benefit from greater access to legal help, the substitution of lawyers with generative AI for private transactions may hinder access to justice because corporations and other powerful actors can more readily attain their objectives when transactions costs are reduced.

Melissa Martino - Transformative Public Servicing Courts Reform (MCV Service Centre)

The Magistrate’s Court of Victoria will discuss how a relentless focus on digital and service transformation led to winning the ‘Citizen-centred service design award’ in the public sector earlier this year, re-envisaging the court’s operations to place the user at the centre of its service model.

Kirsten Matoy Carlson - Beyond Client Outcomes: Measuring the Impact of Legal Services in Native Communities

As the most impoverished group in the United States, many American Indians face unmet legal needs similar to other poor Americans. The provision of legal services in Native communities, however, differs substantially from other places. Yet little attention has been paid to how these differences affect program planning and evaluation. This article presents the first, empirical study of outcomes and impacts of legal service delivery in Native communities. It provides important insights into access to justice issues faced by Native Americans and expands existing understandings of how legal services can promote access to justice by identifying gaps in current ways of measuring their outcomes and impacts.

Hugh McDonald - Mapping the Use and Utility of Victoria’s Civil Justice Data

Victoria’s civil justice system generates extensive administrative and service data. This presentation summarises findings from Victoria Law Foundation’s Data Mapping Project, a sustained examination of the use and utility of data held by Victoria’s public legal assistance services, courts and tribunals, and dispute and complaint resolution bodies. This includes what administrative and service data is used for; how it has been improved, and what could be done to further improve utility for access to justice insights and civil justice system oversight. Limits of data coverage, quality, systems, and practices point to opportunities to substantially enhance data utility, prospects for data joining, and civil justice system access, operation, and performance.

Roger Michalski - Partial Pro Se

Scholars and policymakers usually think of pro se litigants in binary terms: either a litigant is represented or not. This all-or-nothing approach has blinded the literature to the possibility of partial pro se litigants. A litigant might be represented at the beginning of a lawsuit but not at the end. This project empirically examines partial pro se litigants in U.S. federal courts. The work consists of three lines of questions. The first line of questions asks whether partial pro se litigants exist. The second line of questions inquires how partial pro se litigants relate to common measures of pro se litigation. The third line of questions asks about the shape of partial pro se litigation.

Nikole Nelson - Bridging the Rural Justice Gap: Innovating & Scaling Up Access to Justice in Alaska

In the US, 92% of low-income people have limited or no access to legal help with life-altering civil legal issues, like evictions, domestic violence, and illegal debt collections.  In Alaska, the rurality of the population, and particularly of Alaska Native communities, only compounds these challenges.  Through regulatory, technological, and programmatic innovations, the Community Justice Worker (CJW) program trains and supervises qualified non-lawyer advocates to scale access to justice in rural Alaska.  Over the course of several month period, researchers and practitioners worked to develop a pilot vision that would scale this program statewide and also serve as a model for addressing the civil justice gap in other communities.

Paul Prettitore - Justice Data and and Access to Justice from the Development Perspective

The presentation will focus on the role of justice data in the ongoing discussions on the relationship between access to justice and poverty from the development perspective. It will cover issues of expanding definitions of poverty, justice data availability and what we think we know about development impacts.

Amanda Victória Queiroz de Souza - Women's Access to Justice in the 21st Century: A Look at the Impact of Gender, Race and Class in Brazil

Women's access to justice is more than the access of victims of crimes in police stations. It is necessary to discuss and guarantee gender equality in access to civil justice, so that women can emancipate themselves as citizens with equitable rights. Using theoretical aspects also from feminist intersectional theory from Kimberle Chrenshaw, among others, this research found interesting evidence on the impact of gender, race and class factors on women's access to justice in Brazil, building a new perspective for the 21st century, based on the framework of Roderick Macdonald scholar.

Spencer Rand - At Law Schools, Must Access to Justice Be Only for Popular Clients and Causes?  Should It Be?

I am often asked to change our more traditional A2J clinic to one with a more popular focus, taking cases students might anticipate when they come to law school wanting to “do social justice.” We could handle “in” cases, like helping children of immigrants, gig workers, or the latest victims of natural disasters or disease, or cases to which students might relate, like special ed. Shifting our focus would leave out the base of clients that many A2J clinics address—local, very poor, primarily minority clients—and traditional legal problems like public benefit and housing cases. Should we do so to meet teaching goals? Might our students be happier, better practitioners, providing better help and more likely to do A2J cases when they graduate?

Katie Robertson - Innovative Responses to Unmet Legal Need - The Australian Stateless Legal Clinic

The Stateless Legal Clinic (SLC) is a unique service providing legal education and aid to eligible stateless children in their application for Australian citizenship. This presentation will examine the origins of this innovative Clinic and suggest that industry lead identification of unmet legal need can provide an ideal basis for legal models that have the potential to provide exciting and challenging learning opportunities for students, while supporting community legal partners and servicing communities whose legal needs would be otherwise unmet. Significantly, this paper will reflect on the critical need to work with and be led by persons with lived experience when designing and delivering legal services.

Rebecca L. Sandefur - Civil Justice Futures: A Framework for Empowering and Expanding Community Justice Workers in the United States

Around the country, jurisdictions are exploring new routes to expanding access to justice by empowering people who are not traditional attorneys to provide legal services.  This paper reviews 1) established community justice worker models in operation in the US, including tribal lay advocates and accredited immigration representatives; 2) emerging justice worker models being advanced through legislation, litigation and regulatory reform; and 3) a framework for developing and deploying these models that focuses on scalability and sustainability.

Melanie Schleiger - Power to Prevent: A Collaborative Approach to Sexual Harassment Services and Reform in Australia

In 2019 Victoria Legal Aid (VLA) established Power to Prevent, a coalition of academics, unions and grassroots community organisations advocating for changes to Australia’s law and policy response to workplace sexual harassment. This national, cross-sectoral collaboration ensured that civil society was coordinated and ready to share considered solutions with government when reform opportunities to prevent and address sexual harassment arose. This presentation explores how innovative partnerships influenced reforms, the challenges involved and what we have learned from this work about access to justice for victim-survivors, including the benefits of seeking broad cultural change as well as individual redress.

Stuti Shah - Beyond the Confines of Carcerality: Re-imagining Justice in Sexual Violence Cases

The presentation will discuss how gender and caste constitute the fabric of India’s penal regime on sexual violence, and illuminate the failures of colonial criminal legal institutions in guaranteeing justice for survivors of sexual violence in India. Uncovering the intersectional impact of gender and caste hegemonies, it utilizes critical Dalit feminism to examine the socio-legal barriers that hinder survivors, particularly subaltern women from marginalized castes, from accessing justice. It proposes a radical reimagining of justice which is de-masculinized and subaltern in its procedure and objective, which centers healing of the survivor and reformation of the perpetrator, and genuinely engages in making society safe for all.

Colleen F. Shanahan - Lawyerless Law Development

This presentation will discuss an ongoing project to empirically examine the absence of law development – at least as it is conventionally understood – in lawyerless courts. It will explore and analyze disproportionate rates of appeal and volume of substantive court opinions in the areas of law that dominate lawyerless courts: housing, debt collection, and family relationships. It will also discuss the puzzle of whether the absence of lawyerless law development is ultimately beneficial or problematic for the most vulnerable litigants seeking access to justice.

Carole Silver - Training, Supporting, and Bolstering Subversive Lawyers and Lawyering

As legal professions around the world face a crossroads with technology and a worldwide access to justice crisis we highlight the role that subversive lawyers and subversive ways of lawyering can play in changing the practice and the entire field of legal services provision generally. We look at the ways subversive lawyering is (and, sadly, isn't) promoted and created in American law schools and the ways that a small c conservative profession can be forced/guided to a more subversive bent. Together, we discuss subversive lawyers and ways of lawyering to help think about context, site making, and experiences at the periphery, and bringing those experiences into the lawyering and legal services space.

Drew Simshaw - Globally-Informed Regulation of Access-to-Justice Oriented Legal Technology

Legal technology has the potential to widen or help close the access-to-justice gap depending on its design, adoption, and use.  While many parts of the world have reformed regulations to facilitate the type of interdisciplinary collaboration necessary for responsible and effective legal technology development, most jurisdictions in the U.S. have not.  This presentation will propose that legal-services regulatory reform processes in the U.S. should be explored at the national level, where expertise, empirical, and economic advantages would yield more informed and impactful reforms at the state level, and will explore how international perspectives can help further inform such large-scale regulatory reform efforts in the U.S. and beyond.

Michele Statz - Access to Justice in Indian Country: Data Neglect and Policy Implications

Even as our understanding of justice gaps in the U.S. grows, there remains very little comprehensive empirical research about access to justice in Indian Country. In response, this presentation will review the unique contours of access to justice in AI/AN communities and will contextualize local behaviors taken in response to justiciable events (both litigants’ and tribal court judges’). Drawing on over five years of mixed-methodological research in rural tribal and state court jurisdictions, it will also analyze the inter-professional and often cross-jurisdictional innovations that may lead to more socio-spatially responsive forms of access and justice in Indian Country.

Jessica Steinberg - The Uptake Puzzle in Expungement of Criminal Records

A persistent issue in access to justice concerns the uptake rate of affirmative remedies.  Millions of tenants are evicted each year, but a far smaller share bring affirmative litigation against their landlords for documented housing code violations. Similarly, millions of consumers are sued for debt, but a tiny fraction bring affirmative claims for violations of collections laws.  Using expungement of criminal records as a case study, this presentation will explore the informational, procedural, and financial barriers that help explain why even expansive affirmative remedies are so rarely operationalized by ordinary people.  Drawing on a survey of the 32 states that permit expungement of felony records, the presentation will explore how courts serve as a locus of control on access barriers and yet have struggled to fulfill their mandate to create systems that permit fulfillment of rights.  It will also explore the ways in which local legislatures responsible for rights-creation erroneously assume courts have the resources and expertise to implement statutory directives, compounding the access-to-justice barriers.

Jane Stoever - Removing the Bias of Criminal Convictions from Family Law

What happens when a legal system reduces a person to a record of arrests and prosecutions and prioritizes that information in family court? And what are the implications when this legal system is rooted in racism; disproportionately arrests, charges, and sentences people of color; and increasingly criminalizes domestic violence survivors? The Black Lives Matter movement heightened the need to expose racial injustice in areas that scholars often overlook. Professor Stoever's work examines judicial reliance on convictions in family law and civil domestic violence proceedings. Judges are currently provided with entire criminal histories, and statutes explicitly allow for or require family court judges to consider all past convictions and the probation and parole status of litigants seeking to secure custody or visitation of their children, form a family through adoption, or receive protection from domestic violence, as revealed by the fifty-state survey conducted for this project. Given the stark racial disparities that pervade the criminal legal system, the convergence of heuristics and bias profoundly impacts litigants’ lives, relationships, families, and communities. Judges’ implicit biases coupled with structural hurdles, such as the high-volume dockets of criminal and family courts, further affect adjudication and pressure parties to accept plea offers or settlements. Professor Stoever's presentation also addresses survivors’ advocates potential objections to decreasing judicial reliance on criminal convictions and the imperative to avoid minimizing harms experienced by people of color. She concludes by offering a statutory framework to reform and, for many types of convictions, remove the role of criminal convictions in civil domestic violence and family court proceedings. These statutory reforms are positioned alongside emerging expungement and vacatur laws. Without the recommended remedy, racial bias and the stigma of criminality will continue infecting family law cases, protection from domestic abuse, and caretaking relationships. 

James Stone - Auto Clubs and the Making of Unauthorized Practice

It may come as a surprise that, in the early 1900s, A.A.A. and other auto clubs, on top of roadside assistance and the like, provided extensive legal services to their members. For the annual dues, salaried club lawyers defended members on almost every conceivable criminal and civil issue arising out of car usage. The practice was both popular and widespread. But suddenly, during the Great Depression, bar associations turned on the clubs, suing their legal departments out of existence and codifying much of modern UPL doctrine along the way. Unearthing this essential but long-forgotten episode, this article picks apart the wreckage of a century-old collision whose profound reverberations can be felt to the present day.

Bryce Stoliker & Brea Lowenberger - A Legal Needs Survey in the Province of Saskatchewan: Perspectives of Lawyers and Legal and Non-Legal Service Providers

This project sought to design and administer a province-specific legal needs survey to assess the justice-related problems, legal needs, and barriers to access to justice within communities in Saskatchewan. Two survey instruments, broadly referred to as the 2021-2022 Saskatchewan Legal Needs Survey (comprising of a Community Agency Survey and Lawyer Survey), were designed to assess Saskatchewan communities’ legal needs and accesses to justice issues from the perspective of those who provide justice-related support and services. The primary focus of this presentation will be to discuss the aims of the project, methodology, as well as key findings and implications from Saskatchewan’s 2021-2022 Legal Needs Survey.

Shauhin Talesh - Insuring Cyber Insecurity: Insurance Companies as Symbolic Regulators

Drawing on empirical observations over the past 5 years, this paper offers an explanation for why insurers who manage cybersecurity and privacy law compliance among organizations have not been more successful in curtailing breaches. The analysis draws on Talesh's “new institutional theory of insurance,” which explains how insurers shape the content and meaning of law among organizations that purchase insurance. In response to vague  privacy laws and a lack of strong government oversight, insurers offer cyber insurance and a series of risk-management services to their customers. These services convey legitimacy to the public and to insureds, but fall short of improving the robustness of organizations, rendering them largely symbolic.

Heather Tanana - Water Insecurity in Indian Country: Securing the Human Right to Water for All Americans

Clean water access is a fundamental human right, yet water insecurity remains pervasive across many tribal communities. Native American households are 19 times more likely than white households to lack indoor plumbing. Within the Navajo Nation -- the largest tribe in the United States -- an estimated 30-40 percent of residents lack clean water access in their homes. Climate change is further threatening scarce water resources. This presentation will discuss tribal efforts within the Colorado River Basin to secure water access for their homelands and to protect their people. In the wake of Arizona v. Navajo Nation, the federal government's duty to ensure a permanent homeland will also be addressed.

Whitney K. Taylor - The Paradoxical Effects of Increased Access to Justice

This paper tackles an intentionally provocative question: is there such thing as too much access to justice? Conventional wisdom suggests that barriers to access to justice ought to be low. Countless reform efforts put in place throughout the world have sought to increase access to justice and strengthen judicial institutions. This paper shows how lowering material barriers to access to justice can have paradoxical effects, handcuffing judges, inhibiting claim-making, and reinforcing existing inequalities. Turning to in-depth interviews and descriptive statistics, this paper explores the effects of a radical experiment in increasing access to justice in Colombia, the introduction of the acción de tutela.

Samuel A. Thumma - The Great Digital Accelerator: How Post-Pandemic Court Technology Is Enhancing Access to Justice

Building on Arizona’s experience, this presentation will focus on historical efforts, recent advances and data showing the power of technology to enhance access to justice. This presentation will look at data and lessons to assess effectiveness in providing access to justice. We will address the impact of equality in access to justice, including how technology and the elimination of peremptory strikes have changed jury panels. We also hope to have data from follow-up surveys of the judiciary and the bar to assess progress. We will offer insight into what is working, and what is not, along with guidance on policy formulation and refinement in the court technology space.

Tshenolo Tshoaedi - Innovating partnerships between the Judiciary, Community-based paralegals and legal professionals - effective access to justice in South Africa

Examining and comparing how community-based paralegals (CBPs) as alternative legal service providers in South Africa and Sierra Leone have innovated models of servicing members of the public in partnership with the state courts. How the South African and Sierra Leone contexts structured funding, navigated the prevailing dynamic between legal professionals and community-based paralegals, envisioned long term sustainability for these offerings, the role of the courts in creating an enabling environment for alternative legal services to be provided and what some of these services are and how are they accounted for. The regulation of alternative legal service providers in each country and how this has affected recognition of services provided.

Chalita Ugrinovski & Donna Askew - Strengthening Intake Quality to improve Access, Triage and Services

Understanding and improving ‘legal capability’ and utilising data and quality systems to provide and develop integrated, person-centred services tailored to the needs of individuals experiencing disadvantage is both a necessary and emerging field in legal assistance. There are many systemic and intersectional factors that may affect someone’s ability to successfully access justice. The ease of Intake at the front-end of legal service provision process plays a pivotal role. ECLC’s Intake and Data Quality Team in collaboration with the Victoria Law Foundation will lead a presentation and discussion on developing triage service design and delivery principles to meet intersecting legal help-seeking needs through an evidence-based approach.

Shelom Velasco - Can Victims of Human Rights Violations Obtain Justice by Having Those Violations Acknowledged?

While some believe that a state admitting responsibility in an international forum shows a genuine effort to make amends with victims, there are cases where states only do so to avoid harsher judgments and scrutiny from international courts. This article analyzed 129 cases from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) using both quantitative and qualitative methods to test this theory. Surprisingly, the quantitative analysis found that states admitting responsibility have lower compliance rates with IACtHR judgments than those that do not. The qualitative study examined all court documents related to the cases, including judgments on merits, reparations, costs, monitoring orders, and resolutions, breaking down the interaction between the state and the IACtHR into five stages. Acknowledging responsibility is the first step in a strategy aimed at reducing the likelihood of the Court going after high-level national authorities involved in human rights cases. The study also shows that the IACtHR is less likely to monitor reparations compliance when the state acknowledges responsibility.

Michelle Waite - Legal Aid Decision-Making: Determining the Content of Rights to Civil Legal Aid and Access to Rights Protection in Practice

Exceptional Case Funding (ECF) is a form of legal aid that must be made available where without access to legal advice/representation an individual’s rights under the European Convention on Human Rights are at risk of violation. My current research project employs collaborative advice-led ethnography to explore how Legal Aid Agency treatment of ECF applications determines the content of rights to civil legal aid and access to rights protection in practice. Some early data will be presented concerning (1) the gaps between the law, guidance and decision-making practice (2) the kinds of circumstances in which a right to civil legal aid can be established and (3) other factors  affecting access to rights protection in practice.

Eli Wald - The “No-Problem” Problem and the Surprising Recipe for Greater Access to Civil Justice

Lawyers and the ABA must be part of greater access to justice reforms because without their active support, let alone outright opposition, state-driven deregulatory efforts are likely going to stall. Specifically, the ABA must take the lead in engaging all lawyers by revising the rules of professional conduct to mandate pro bono, and by spearheading a national effort to undo UPL statutes. The point of mandatory pro bono would not be to solve the insufficient access to legal services problem but to engage all lawyers in the quest for increased access. The ABA played a major role nearly a century ago orchestrating state and regional bar associations’ push for the adoption of UPL statues, its direction would be imperative for undoing them.

Amy Widman - Access to Justice in Administrative Proceedings

My research maps the main principles animating access to civil justice reforms in the courts and applies those principles to frame a series of administrative law reforms. Administrative law has been slow to address inequities and has much to learn from how other justice institutions are reforming to prioritize access. At the same time, civil justice outcomes are intricately connected to public law adjudicative structures. I will share results of a national survey of state administrative law judges on issues of access in state administrative adjudications, examine what representation adds to these types of adjudications, and explore best practices to increase access to justice in agencies.

Zach Zarnow - From the Outside In: Access to Justice In the Courts

Many academics and researchers focused on increasing access to justice find themselves working around, in spite of, or in ignorance of, the courts. And there are reasons for this! In this session I will offer a number of examples of successful access to justice initiatives grounded in the courts as well as advice and some new tools for practitioners and researchers who want to better engage with the courts in their work.