Access to Justice
From the founding of the American Bar Foundation, ABF scholars have been deeply engaged with fundamental questions of access to justice. The ABF’s access to justice project, Pursuing Law’s Promise, continues this tradition through innovative empirical research and symposia that bridge the divides of scholarship and practice. The activities of Pursuing Law’s Promise produce new knowledge that informs our basic understanding of law and legal processes and is a powerful resource for policy makers and service providers as they seek to respond to the legal needs of the public today.
Current activities include:
Civil Legal Needs and Public Legal Understanding Handout
Click here to access this handout, prepared by Rebecca Sandefur.
Access Across America
Access Across America is the first-ever state-by-state portrait of the services available to assist the U.S. public in accessing civil justice. For the nation as a whole and individually for the 50 states and the District of Columbia, the report documents six components of contemporary access to civil justice:
- Eligibility. Who is eligible for different services, including means-tested and other targeted services, as well as free services available to the general public.
- Delivery. How access services are delivered, including court-based services, neighborhood offices, and telephone- and web-provided legal advice, information and assistance.
- Connecting with assistance. How people can connect with access to civil justice resources, such as through hotlines, local offices, court-based programs, web interfaces, and co-location with other kinds of services, such as medical or social services.
- Funding. How access programs are funded.
- Coordination. How access services and funding are coordinated, including through lead agencies, state access commissions, central funders, and informal networks.
- Emerging definitions of access. How ethical rules are changing to create new forms of both subsidized and market-based sources of civil legal assistance, such as through limited scope lawyers’ services, collaborative lawyering, and the availability of nonlawyer legal technicians.
To download the full report, click here. To download the Executive Summary, click on the cover image below:
Building Capacity for Access to Justice Research
In December 2012, the ABF will host a workshop, Access to Civil Justice: Re-Envisioning and Reinvigorating Research. This workshop will bring together researchers and people from the field to develop and begin work on a new research agenda for access to civil justice. Attendees will include staff from institutions of civil justice, such as judges, leaders from the organized bar, and legal services practitioners as well as scholars from law, statistics and the social and behavioral sciences. The convening seeks to synthesize and coordinate existing research activity and to generate new research activity, including research that can inform policy.
Please see the Call for Posters. Poster proposals are due Friday, November 16, 2012.
Community Needs and Services Study
With support from the National Science Foundation (SES-1123507), the American Bar Foundation is launching a new, comprehensive civil justice study, the Community Needs and Services Study (CNSS). The study, which will run for two years, investigates simultaneously public experience with civil justice problems and the resources available to assist people in responding to them. The Study focuses on a core set of commonly experienced problems surrounding issues such as personal finances, housing and family relationships. These problems are carefully selected to be those that have civil legal aspects, raise civil legal issues and have consequences shaped by civil law. The CNSS is the first-ever study to pair an investigation of the civil justice problems people experience with an investigation of the legal and non-legal resources available to assist them in handling those problems.
Contact Rebecca Sandefur, gro.nfba@rufednasr.