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Accessing Justice in the Contemporary USA: Findings from the Community Needs and Services Study
... Finally, psychological barriers to access derive from an individual's lack of familiarity with legal proceedings, language mismatch, and the fear and confusion that accompany "mysterious legal machinations" (Johnson, 1978), especially among those from disadvantaged outgroups (Mentovich, Prescott, & Rabinovich-Einy, 2020). Subsequent research has refined and tailored this typology to various contexts, without distracting from the significance of these basic types of barriers (Mor, 2017;Sandefur, 2014). ...
... In part for these reasons, system-provided "access," unlike procedural justice, almost surely affects different groups of actual and potential court users differently. Access to justice links to core social structures (Sandefur, 2014), and commentators critique lack of access as perpetuating existing social inequities because the same people who cannot realize their legal rights also belong to the economically disadvantaged echelons of society (Sandefur, 2008). Efforts to increase access therefore typically concentrate on individuals who come from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds . ...
... Second, our access-to-justice construct is specific to the characteristics of the setting we study: unrepresented parties who participate in online proceedings. Research on access to justice often focuses on the need for an attorney, a concern that relates to costs, but not exclusively (Rhode, 2001;Sandefur, 2014). While representation eases some access barriers, such as the complexity of proceedings and fear of participation, it also raises certain challenges (Zimerman & Tyler, 2010). ...
Courts have long struggled to bridge the access‐to‐justice gap associated with in‐person hearings, which makes the recent adoption of online legal proceedings potentially beneficial. Online proceedings hold promise for better access: they occur remotely, can proceed asynchronously, and often rely solely on written communication. Yet these very qualities may also undermine some of the well‐established elements of procedural‐justice perceptions, a primary predictor of how people view the legal system's legitimacy. This paper examines the implications of shifting legal proceedings online for both procedural‐justice and access‐to‐justice perceptions. It also investigates the relationship of both types of perceptions with system legitimacy, as well as the relative weight these predictors carry across litigant income levels. Drawing on online traffic court cases, we find that perceptions of procedural justice and access to justice are each separately associated with a litigant's appraisal of system legitimacy, but among lower‐income parties, access to justice is a stronger predictor, while procedural justice dominates among higher‐income parties. These findings highlight the need to incorporate access‐to‐justice perceptions into existing models of legal legitimacy.
... While many scholars documented that rather than too much, there was and is, in fact, underclaiming, in torts (Abel 1987, Saks 1992, medical malpractice (Saks 1993, Baker 2007, employment (Edelman 2016), consumer (Merry 1990, Engel 2016 or litigation in general (Galanter 2004), such arguments depend on what is considered a "frameable" legal claim (Felstiner et al. 1980-81) that can actually be made in a court. Socio-legal scholars have long studied claiming patterns (Miller and Sarat 1980-81) and legal needs (Sandefur 2014) to determine whether, in fact, citizens have access to justice and can actually claim (in a lawsuit or otherwise) for various perceived harms and wrongs. Most of these studies suggest that there is underclaiming due to costs of lawyers, litigation fees, lack of knowledge about legal rights and use of "others" to assist with what are not always considered to be "legal" problems (Menkel-Meadow 1979, Sandefur 2014. ...
... Socio-legal scholars have long studied claiming patterns (Miller and Sarat 1980-81) and legal needs (Sandefur 2014) to determine whether, in fact, citizens have access to justice and can actually claim (in a lawsuit or otherwise) for various perceived harms and wrongs. Most of these studies suggest that there is underclaiming due to costs of lawyers, litigation fees, lack of knowledge about legal rights and use of "others" to assist with what are not always considered to be "legal" problems (Menkel-Meadow 1979, Sandefur 2014. In recent years, the numbers of cases that are brought by pro se (not represented by lawyers) claimants has increased dramatically, in the United States, as elsewhere. ...
... Both Federal Rules (Rule 16) and statutes (Civil Justice Reform Act 1990) now mandate the use of some settlement process before a trial in federal court, and most state courts also have such mandatory or strongly recommended ADR pre-requisites to trial 8 (Menkel-Meadow 2013). Fourth, as demonstrated in the access to justice studies noted above, there are many impediments to the use of courts by ordinary people (e.g., "framing" of a problem as a legal matter [Menkel-Meadow 1979 andSandefur 2014]); costs and fees, access to lawyers and physical accessibility to a court). Fifth, in some matters, mass torts and mass claims, a new form of mass settlement through claims facilities and class action settlements (Rule 23e) (see, e.g., Sept 11 Victims Compensation Fund, Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, Catholic Church claims fund [Elie 2019], product liability and disasters), have removed cases from the courts, both after filing and before filing, but before any individualized adjudication. ...
This article reviews the claims about rates of litigation in the United States, as either “too much” or “too little” (e.g. “The Vanishing Trial”). While we need to understand aggregate litigation rates to assess access to justice, it may be more important to understand litigation rates in the context of differentiated case types. Litigation, in some cases, produces too “brittle” (binary) or costly outcomes, which is what led to the American “A” (alternative/appropriate) Dispute Resolution movement. This movement (now moving across the globe) may provide “process pluralism” with greater flexibility in outcome and cost variations, (now often called “a”ccesible dispute resolution”). However, litigation is still important in a variety of justice-seeking contexts (e.g. for new rights creation, old rights enforcement, and precedent elaboration). This article suggests that the question of how much litigation is appropriate in any legal culture is dependent on a variety of factors that goes beyond simple aggregate counting. The article concludes with a critique of recent American legal practices in restricting litigation through mandatory arbitration, non-disclosure agreements, class action limitations, privatized mass claim settlements, and restrictive jurisdictional interpretations in judicial decision making and legislation.
... Some researchers investigate the phenomena that underlie the gap, such as people's reasons for not seeking legal help (Pleasance et al., 2010;Sandefur, 2007;Young, 2024). More frequently, access to justice work maps civil legal need (IAALS, 2021;LSC, 2017;Sandefur, 2014;Young and Billings, 2023) and investigates new ways to meet it (Clarke and Ricca, 2022;Hurder, 1999;Prescott, 2017;Sandefur and Denne, 2022). In the absence of a civil right to counsel, researchers have proposed new ways to provide more help, from traditional courts and lawyers (Petersen, 2020;Shanahan et al., 2022) and via other means as well, including nonlawyer help providers (Rhode and Ricca, 2014;Steinberg et al., 2021), new models of justice provision (Cannon, 2023;Michener, 2022;Mitchell, 2023), technological interventions (Bell, 2019;Cabral et al., 2012;Sandefur, 2019aSandefur, , 2019bSourdin et al., 2020), and region-specific solutions for rural areas (Page and Farrell, 2023;Pruitt et al., 2018). ...
... Moreover, the consequences of civil legal problems mirror the consequences of interactions with the criminal legal system-a central focus of criminologists and sociologists of crime. The ripple effects of unresolved civil justice problems erode physical and mental health, financial security, and housing and employment stability (Genn, 2019;Gold, 2016;LSC, 2017;Sandefur, 2014), strikingly similar to the consequences of criminal justice interactions (Esposito et al., 2017;Sugie and Turney, 2017). ...
... In US rural communities, approximately 10 million Americans have incomes below 125% of the federal poverty line, and three-quarters of these face at least one civil legal problem in a year. Significantly, however, only 14% of rural residents-a rate less than half the national average-receive adequate assistance for civil legal problems (Legal Service Corporation 2017; see also Pruitt et al. 2018;Sandefur 2014). Rural criminal defendants don't necessarily fare better-especially in a state like Wisconsin, where abysmally low state pay rates for court-appointed attorneys coupled with a shortage of rural attorneys result in individuals having to wait as many as four months before receiving a public defender (Coutou 2018; WI county data on file with author). ...
... Indirectly, however, these survey data heighten the responsibility I feel to employ a necessarily multidimensional approach to low-income individuals' documented experiences of exclusion along with their alternative, expansive, and insistent understandings of legal rights and entitlements. Significantly, these nuanced perspectives are largely absent in the prevailing US "A2J" literature, which tends to characterize lowincome litigants as not thinking justiciable issues are legal or have legal remedies (Pleasence et al. 2011;Sandefur 2014;. ...
Rural state and tribal court judges in the upper US Midwest offer an embodied alternative to prevailing understandings of “access to justice.” Owing to the high density of social acquaintanceship, coupled with the rise in unrepresented litigants and the impossibility of most proposed state access to justice initiatives, what ultimately makes a rural courtroom accessible to parties without counsel is the judge. I draw on over four years of ethnographic fieldwork and an interdisciplinary theoretical framework to illuminate the lived consequences and global implications of judges' responses, which can be read as grassroots‐level creativity, as resistance, or simply as “getting by.”
... This reflects both participation in social and economic life -which increases exposure to circumstances that can give rise to problems -and being unable to avoid or mitigate problems, which increases the likelihood that such exposure ultimately results in justiciable problems (Pleasence et al. 2014). Although findings are mixed regarding the relationship between income and the overall incidence of justiciable problems (HiiL and IAALS 2021; Pleasence et al. 2014;Sandefur 2014), recent national survey data from the United States finds that individuals in lower-income households are more likely to report experiencing more serious justiciable problems (HiiL and IAALS 2021). This finding is consistent with data from other jurisdictions noting the increased vulnerability of those who are poorer to many types of legal problems (Pleasence et al. 2014). ...
Individuals routinely engage in instrumental transactional legal behavior, from generating tax returns to signing leases to negotiating employment terms. While some individuals undertake these activities equipped with the skills, knowledge, and capacity to behave strategically, others do not. In this article, we introduce the concept of legal actuation to describe this legal behavior and theorize its role as a source of inequality under the law. Using estate planning as an empirical example, we consider how variation in legal actuation may serve to reproduce economic inequalities and investigate the role of legal socialization, knowledge, and capability as mechanisms of advantage. In doing so, we draw attention to an understudied dimension of everyday legal behavior that has important implications for equal justice and the relationship between law and inequality.
... Almeida and Fauvrelle (2013) and França, Duenhas and Gonçalves (2014) found that individuals with higher levels of income and education were more likely to access justice. In a survey conducted in a medium-sized Midwestern city in the United States, Sandefur (2014) investigated residents' experiences with different civil justice situations and concluded that the main barriers to seeking assistance from third parties (e.g., lawyers or courts) were: (i) the financial cost (expressed here as income); and, especially, (ii) the lack of knowledge about legal guarantees and the institutional framework (expressed here as education). ...
In Brazil, young Black males are far more likely to experience criminal violence (e.g., homicide, police lethality and assault) than young White males. However, race might also affect the ex-post scenario; that is, Blacks and Whites may go to the police seeking solutions against criminal violence with different probabilities. In this paper, we identified and quantified the sources of the racial differential in accessing justice between Blacks and Whites in Brazil. Using microdata from the Brazilian Household Survey, we used the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition to isolate the discriminatory component from social indicators correlated with access to justice. We found that structural attributes explain only part (around 60%) of the racial differential in accessing justice. A significant portion of the discrepancy (at least 40%) provides evidence of racial discrimination. In addition, the spatial dynamics revealed that the Northeast region of Brazil presents the most discriminatory scenario in the country, a region historically characterised by higher social inequalities and violent mortality.
... For example, complaints about maladministration of public bodies in the public sphere; and complaints about faulty goods and services in the private sphere. Influential studies from the US have shown that while many problems are common, it is not common to go to a lawyer or to a court to seek redress for those problems (Sandefur 2016(Sandefur , 2014. Here, the Ombuds offers a process that consumers/citizens can use (usually at no cost) to address problems they are not likely to go to a court for. ...
This essay builds on my previous comparative work on Ombuds users and develops the notion of cultural patterns, and attitudes, towards disputing in Germany and the UK (Creutzfeldt & Bradford 2018, Creutzfeldt 2016). I argue that expectations of Ombuds processes are grounded in our socialization of legal or legal-adjacent processes. I explore, through the lens of legal consciousness, the role that legal culture plays in our interactions with the Ombuds in two countries. I do this through drawing on evidence from my existing empirical datasets. Then, I discuss the impact of the pandemic on the developed notion of cultural disputing behaviour in Germany and in the UK and I posit that we have to reimagine legal consciousness in the online justice space, which claims its own hegemony. For instance, an indication of the things which shape, or problems which arise out of, or are enhanced by, the digital space shaping our legal consciousness. The essay concludes by suggesting new ways of thinking about our patterns of online disputing, detached from our national cultural context, embracing an emerging digital legal consciousness with an enduring impact on our expectations from a justice system and the Ombuds process.
... In particular, Balmer and others (2010) noted that individuals are less likely to seek redress for situations involving discrimination, police misconduct, and clinical negligence, whereas people are more likely to seek legal assistance for divorce, mental health, and separation cases. In a different study, Sandefur (2014) found that people are least likely to take action in cases relating to employment, government benefits, and insurance, while more likely to address relationship breakdowns and issues concerning a child's education. ...
Understanding the pathways to access to justice has been identified as a key priority for stakeholders working within the civil justice system. Although there is a growing body of evidence highlighting the incidence of legal problems, much less is known about the pathways people take to resolve these problems. In British Columbia, specifically, there is very limited research on the pathways people take to resolve their civil and family legal issues. Yet, knowing the pathways people take is essential in making sense of how people’s legal needs are met. Based on qualitative interviews, this study explored the main pathways people use to resolve civil and family justice problems, the barriers and obstacles they encounter, the assistance they seek and sometimes receive, and the decisions they make along the way. The approach was fruitful and produced a snapshot picture of people’s lived experience of access to justice.
... This pattern goes well beyond criminal law. As decades of sociolegal scholarship have demonstrated, contrary to their image as sue-happy litigants, Americans typically forgo opportunities to press claims, settling quickly or "lumping" their potential grievances (Abel 1988, Miller & Sarat 1980, Sandefur 2014. Adversarial legalism as a structure seems to invite participation, but for individuals and organizations the costs of participation may in practice prove too steep. ...
The concept of adversarial legalism has been widely used by scholars of law, public administration, public policy, political science, sociology, and Law and Society, but the varying ways in which the concept has been employed raise concerns that it has become stretched to the point of incoherence. We argue that adversarial legalism entails both a style, an everyday practice of dispute resolution and policy making with distinct attributes, and a structure of governance that can be compared to other structures of authority. Untangling these aspects of adversarial legalism allows us to make sense of its different uses and identify future avenues of inquiry. Despite its wide application, we argue that adversarial legalism is in fact underutilized, especially in studies aimed at understanding consequences of judicialization, legalization, and juridification in the United States and abroad.
Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Law and Social Science, Volume 16 is October 13, 2020. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
... In a study on civil justice experiences, many people in the United States were not aware that their problems were of a legal nature. Instead, many issues are resolved in informal channels or people resolve them on their own (Sandefur 2014). Further, Bennett Cattaneo et al. (2007 found that many IPV victims seek both legal and extralegal help. ...
This note summarizes extant research on civil legal aid, which includes provision of legal services for indigent and low-income individuals, and its applications for DV and IPV victims, and concludes with suggestions for improving service delivery and research in the field. Results of searches of online databases for peer-reviewed and non-peer reviewed articles, reports, analyses, and evaluations of civil legal aid in the United States were analyzed and critically assessed. Civil legal aid is a promising but underfunded and underexplored avenue for responding to and reducing domestic violence (DV), intimate partner violence (IPV), and their devastating effects. Providing civil counsel in divorce, custody, and protective order proceedings can significantly improve outcomes for DV and IPV victims and their children as well as serve as a cost-effective strategy for reducing violence and generating positive social returns.
... Various combinations of LSRC associates produced analyses of the data; see, e.g., Denvir, Balmer and Pleasance, 2011;Denver, Balmer andBuck, 2012, 2013a;Buck, Pleasance and Balmer, 2008). Pleasance was an advisor on a National Science Foundation grant-funded project (Sandefur, 2014) that surveyed a U.S. nationwide sample on their experiences with "civil justice situations;" findings indicated that people used self-help (taking action on their own without third party assistance) in 46% of these situations. ...
This paper reports a portion of the results of a 2016 mixed methods study on the acquisition of legal information by members of the public. While information acquisition by health information seekers has been extensively studied, similar studies of legal consumers are almost nonexistent. Even less research has focused on incidental encounters with legal information. Based upon established models of human information behavior, and informed by numerous studies of health information acquisition by consumers, this study examined the relationship of personal, contextual, affective and environmental factors with frequency of legal information acquisition. In one phase of the study, an online survey was administered to 385 adults without formal legal training. Reported frequency of legal information searching and incidental encountering (IE) of legal information were assessed for significant relationships with personal characteristics and environmental factors. Age, income and previous experience with the legal system were associated with greater legal search frequency. Age, race and previous experience with the legal system were associated with greater frequency of legal IE. Exposure to multiple information sources and multiple mass media sources were associated with greater frequency of both legal search and IE. The study was exploratory in nature, but it serves as a first step in assessing civil legal information acquisition by American adults without specialized legal training. It also explicitly ties legal consciousness, and legal access, to information acquisition practices.
... Although not directly comparable, only 66% of a random sample of the general population reported that they have experienced a civil legal issue. 9 In our sample, the most common civil legal issues were around housing, employment, health insurance, and disability benefits. Our survey also found that an overwhelming majority of homeless service sites reported that access to legal services would benefit patients, but only half of all sites reported systematically screening for civil legal issues, and only 19% of the sites had received training on screening for legal services. ...
Objectives:
To examine civil legal needs among people experiencing homelessness and the extent to which medical-legal partnerships exist in homeless service sites, which promote the integration of civil legal aid professionals into health care settings.
Methods:
We surveyed a national sample of 48 homeless service sites across 26 states in November 2015. The survey asked about needs, attitudes, and practices related to civil legal issues, including medical-legal partnerships.
Results:
More than 90% of the homeless service sites reported that their patients experienced at least 1 civil legal issue, particularly around housing, employment, health insurance, and disability benefits. However, only half of all sites reported screening patients for civil legal issues, and only 10% had a medical-legal partnership. The large majority of sites reported interest in receiving training on screening for civil legal issues and developing medical-legal partnerships.
Conclusions:
There is great need and potential to deploy civil legal services in health settings to serve unstably housed populations. Training homeless service providers how to screen for civil legal issues and how to develop medical-legal partnerships would better equip them to provide comprehensive care. (Am J Public Health. Published online ahead of print January 19, 2017: e1-e4. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2016.303596).
... Rebecca Sanderfur concluded that people who were closer to the bottom of unequal structure will be less willing to undertake legal actions to protect themselves and their interest. 24 On the other hand, holistic approaches to access to justice propose new ways of achieving justice implying participatory roles of all affected parties in the process using problem-solving and negotiation mechanisms. Focusing on enhancing the justice quality in both, relations and transactions where people are engaged, 25 they employ various mechanisms to seek justice and legal assistance based on three key elements respectively, a) equality to access to legal services (aiming to ensure that all persons have access to high quality legal services to protect their rights despite their means); b) national equity (aiming to ensure that all persons enjoy equal access to legal services); c) equality before the law (aiming to ensure that all persons are entitled to equal opportunities to access services despite their race, ethnicity, gender and disability). ...
Access to justice system is a broad notion which refers to the entire process that encompasses both, procedural aspects as well as the achievement of "just and equitable" legal and judicial outcomes. This paper uses a bottom-up approach and a set of primary and secondary data to assess the accessibility of the justice system in Albania based on the perceptions of 360 Roma people aged 19 years and older located in nine districts of the country. Its findings show that this target group has been reluctant to access this system because of low level of information about it, long bureaucratic procedures in place, corruption, discrimination and poor quality service delivered by structures established to provide free legal aid for the poor. Being poorly served Roma respondents call for more justice and equality, more support to this community to access justice system and more qualified services tailored to them. Finally, findings of this paper highlight various gaps which should be addressed by shaping access to justice system in Albania.
... The findings have practical and theoretical implications. Lawyers' monopoly on appearance and representation in the United States remains strong, and many thousands of people go unrepresented every year in civil matters that can lead to bankruptcy, penury, homelessness, and lost custody of their children (Consortium on Legal Services and the Public 1994; Sandefur 2014). The results reveal that expanded public access to representation could lead to many more members of the public prevailing than is currently the case. ...
Lawyers keep the gates of public justice institutions, particularly through their roles in formal procedures like hearings and trials. Yet, it is not clear what lawyers do in such quintessentially legal settings: conclusions from past research are bedeviled by a lack of clear theory and inconsistencies in research design. Conceptualizing litigation work in terms of professional expertise, I conduct a theoretically grounded synthesis of the findings of extant studies of lawyers’ impact on civil case outcomes. Using an innovative combination of statistical techniques—meta-analysis and nonparametric bounding—the present study transcends previous work to reveal a domain of consensus for lawyers’ effect on case outcomes and to explore why this effect varies so greatly across past studies. For the types of cases researched to date, knowledge of substantive law explains surprisingly little of lawyers’ advantage compared to lay people appearing unrepresented. Instead, lawyers’ impact is greatest when they assist in navigating relatively simple (to lawyers) procedures and where their relational expertise helps courts follow their own rules. Findings for law generalize to other professions, where substantive and relational expertise may shape the conduct and consequences of professional work.
Race-and-class-subjugated communities continue to experience disproportionate police violence despite increased attention to this longstanding problem. This study examines how residents make sense of the legal issues that arise from these encounters and turn to civil law for assistance. I do so by unifying scholarship on police encounters, legal consciousness, and access to justice to consider the obstacles everyday people encounter when they consider filing a civil legal claim in the aftermath of police violence. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with 24 residents and two attorneys specializing in police brutality, I find that all residents, but especially those who sought civil legal justice, experienced what this study calls a legal mirage—which occurs when a knowable legal process exists to pursue one’s rights, but a variety of barriers (e.g., structural, human, financial) make that process unreachable. Three obstacles reinforced this mirage: difficulties obtaining competent representation, unresponsiveness when securing evidence, and frustration navigating municipal indemnification. I conclude by outlining the practical implications of this research for advocates looking to increase access to civil legal services and reduce police violence. Without these interventions, civil legal justice may remain elusive and beyond the reach of everyday people.
This chapter begins with a brief overview of human rights law in access to justice. I identify a pattern (access rights are typically understood as a specification of a right to ‘equality before the law’), three dimensions of evaluative concern (remedial efficacy, procedural safeguards, and agency in legal affairs) and specific duties of assistance (positive obligations, which Governments are under an obligation to fulfill) in access to justice. Then, the chapter considers four current challenges to the use of human right language and discourse in political justification and show their direct relevance to the field of access to justice. Neither one of these challenges, this chapter argues, should advise us to dismiss talk of access-rights altogether. Rather, this chapter argues that they point us to where political talk of access rights requires serious scrutiny and further supplementation.
As more groups consider how AI may be used in the legal sector, this paper envisions how companies and policymakers can prioritize the perspective of community members as they design AI and policies around it. It presents findings of structured interviews and design sessions with community members, in which they were asked about whether, how, and why they would use AI tools powered by large language models to respond to legal problems like receiving an eviction notice. The respondents reviewed options for simple versus complex interfaces for AI tools, and expressed how they would want to engage with an AI tool to resolve a legal problem. These empirical findings provide directions that can counterbalance legal domain experts' proposals about the public interest around AI, as expressed by attorneys, court officials, advocates and regulators. By hearing directly from community members about how they want to use AI for civil justice tasks, what risks concern them, and the value they would find in different kinds of AI tools, this research can ensure that people's points of view are understood and prioritized, rather than only domain experts' assertions about people's needs and preferences around legal help AI.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘A complexity science approach to law and governance'.
As immigration enforcement increases, so does the detention of immigrants facing the threat of deportation. Detained without the support of a public defender system—a feature of U.S. immigration law—immigrants face a complex immigration court that is adversarial and can produce dire consequences, including family and community exile, violence, or even death, if they are deported. This paper chronicles the experiences of formerly detained immigrants and how they sought to access justice through multiple means while detained. To win their freedom from detention, they engaged in “precarious legal patchworking” (PLP), during which they haphazardly cobbled together legal resources and assistance from multiple sources, including pro-bono aid, Jailhouse Lawyers, and social networks. PLP speaks to the person’s tenacity amidst precarity, but it also unveils the fragility of this strategy because patchworking can extend detention or complicate one’s case. The lack of access to counsel is a form of legal violence, and stratifying access to representation in this way creates an underclass of people who are systematically denied justice.
The existence of an effective legal system is assumed throughout economic analysis, and yet there has been little study of the economics of legal markets themselves. Research to date has focused narrowly on the economics of markets for lawyers. In this review, I distinguish legal markets from the market for lawyers and show how excessive regulation of our legal markets—by lawyers themselves—distorts economic activity and growth. It does so primarily by inhibiting investment in the legal and regulatory technologies needed to respond to the transformation of the economy wrought by globalization, digitization, aspirations for inclusion, and the coming of artificial intelligence. (JEL J44, K00, K40, L84)
This project raises one of the most prevalent problems facing the internationalization of access to justice in the continent today: the challenge of facilitating an international debate without the dominance of the English language. Although there exists a diverse global community of scholars dedicated to this subject, people dealing with access to justice in everyday life are primarily local and, when attempting to meet the needs of vulnerable persons in their community, their methods are usually framed by local legal approaches and contexts, being mainly dependent on national languages. Promoting a continental conversation thus proves challenging.
The perspective we intend to foster stems from a socio-legal perspective that tries to overcome social hierarchies between lawyers, researchers, and vulnerable persons. We aim to exchange local discussions arising from those actors’ interactions to understand the socio-political and economic challenges to access to justice. In this way, we can learn valuable lessons and build solidarity between similar struggles. To achieve this goal, we chose to welcome papers in the four main languages of the region (English, French, Portuguese and Spanish) and we committed to translating the extended abstracts into those same languages. We also intend to host online debates which are accessible in different languages.
We examined the economic status of women who experienced intimate partner violence (IPV) and sought civil legal aid services over 1 year. Women's average overall income increased, after accounting for both private income increases and public income decreases, by approximately 2.41 for every $1 expended on legal aid services. Legal aid services can improve income and reduce poverty among women experiencing IPV.
This chapter discusses how teachers in a multiethnic context take on the responsibility to support minority students’ social and scholarly integration in the classroom to gain equal access to opportunities. By giving a voice to the teachers, we aimed to analyze in what ways teachers reflect on the situations they recognize as limit-situations (Freire, 1974) and how they act critically to transform them, thereby facilitating the teacher’s process of conscientization (Freire, 1974; 2018) of the multi-ethnic reality of schools and the rights of minority students.
Access to justice scholars sometimes draw analogies with healthcare initiatives. However, they rarely explain why and to what extent the healthcare system is an appropriate source of inspiration for the justice system. This chapter seeks to justify the analogy by providing a more comprehensive and systematic comparison of the two systems. The hope is that this framework will prompt those involved in access to justice reforms to look more frequently beyond the frontiers of law in order to draw inspiration from innovative healthcare solutions. The chapter also sketches some of the areas in which access to justice reforms could take inspiration from access to healthcare reforms.
In this article, we use a Bourdieusian framework to theorize the relationship between cultural capital and legal consciousness, and in turn to consider how variation in legal consciousness contributes to the creation and maintenance of legal hegemony. We investigate how cultural capital shapes the ways people navigate situations that force them to mediate between state‐conferred rights, on one hand, and requests from state authority, on the other. Specifically, we analyze open‐ended responses to a series of vignettes about constitutional rights in the criminal procedure context. We find that high cultural capital gives rise to a greater sense of self‐efficacy in police–citizen interactions. This finding parallels the literature on the influence of cultural capital in the education context and may point to a more general pattern of self‐advocacy within the juridical field. People with high cultural capital also evince a more salient sense of entitlement, understanding their own needs and desires as paramount. The social processes we identify may make people with limited cultural capital more vulnerable to investigative authority, and thus more susceptible to arrest and prosecution. Even if knowledge of a right and the opportunity to assert that right are equally distributed, meaningful access to that right remains inequitable.
Scholarly and academic commentators have been warning of a “crisis” in American legal education since the beginning of the 2008 recession. This article critically examines what they mean by a “crisis”, whether the evidence supports their claims, and the responses they propose.
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