Making Justice Infrastructure More People-Centered
Creating an enabling environment for justice systems that are accessible and effective for everyday people requires robust people-centered justice infrastructure. This includes approaches to justice data, financing, and technology that both reinforce and amplify people-centered justice. Panelists in this webinar will explore what we know and what remains to be understood about these core justice infrastructure needs, including people-centered approaches to collecting and using justice data, examples of effective and impactful justice financing, and insights and innovative approaches to justice technology.
Presenters:
Martin Gramatikov
Director of Knowledge and Research, HiiL
Dr Martin Gramatikov is an expert in empirical legal research, with a focus on access to justice, dispute resolution, and human rights. He holds a law degree and a PhD in political science from Sofia University. His work centers on large-scale justice needs studies, measuring public perceptions of justice, and evaluating the impact of access to justice and dispute resolution programs. Dr Gramatikov develops and applies innovative quantitative and qualitative methods to measure justice as people experience it. His research is widely used to assess justice gaps and progress towards improving access to justice and making justice more people centered. He currently serves as Director of Knowledge and Research at HiiL, where he sets the organization’s research agenda and leads the internalization and externalization of knowledge on access to justice and people-centered justice.
Clare Manuel
Senior Research Associate, ODI
Clare Manuel is a UK lawyer and Senior Research Associate for the Politics and Governance program at ODI. Her research focus is on financing and budgeting for access to justice. She has co-authored pioneering papers on domestic and external financing for justice, costing SDG16.3, scaling up innovative front-line approaches to delivering people centered justice for all, and lessons from global funds.
Prior to joining ODI, Clare was founder and director of The Law & Development Partnership an international development consultancy firm which she ran for 20 years, until the sale of the business. She led projects and provided policy advice for DFID, World Bank, EU and other donors on access justice, business enabling environment, women in business, institutional strengthening, legal reform and adaptive programming in the UK, Africa, Aisa, the Caribbean and the South Pacific. She supported the Governments of Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya and Sierra Leone to develop cross-sectoral justice reform strategies. From 2015-2017 she was program director of DFID’s innovative LASER (Legal Assistance for Economic Reform) Program.
Clare previously worked as an embedded legal / justice adviser in Uganda and Fiji. Her career began as a commercial litigator in a city law firm, and then a UK government lawyer specializing in company investigations, policy work and legislative drafting.
Marcus Manuel
Senior Research Associate, ODI
Marcus Manuel is a Senior Research Associate for ODI. His current research is on financing access to justice. He has published pioneering papers on domestic and external financing for justice, costing SDG16.3 and scaling up innovative front-line approaches to delivering people centered justice for all. Previous research has also included addressing extreme poverty and financing development in fragile states and at sub-national level. Marcus Manuel’s former ODI roles advising on budget reforms.
Prior to joining ODI, Marcus held a number of senior management roles within the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) from 2002 to 2010 responsible for offices and program in Africa and Asia, with annual budgets up to $400 million a year.
Before working at DFID, Marcus worked at HM Treasury, initially as macroeconomic adviser. His final role was head of the newly created department responsible for advice on all aspects of international development. Between 1996–2000, Marcus was seconded to work as the Senior Adviser in the Ugandan Ministry of Finance, Planning and Economic Development where he advised on the national budget, taxation and sector spending strategies, including the pioneering Justice, Law and Order Strategy, the first of its type in the world.
Marcus has a MSc in Economics from London University, after graduating from Oxford University.
Jason Tashea
Founding Director of the Judicial Innovation Fellowship, Georgetown University Law Center
Jason Tashea is a writer and entrepreneur exploring justice and technology. A lawyer by training, he is the court innovation fellow at Renaissance Philanthropy and the courts and AI fellow at Georgetown Law. He is also the co-founder of the Court Innovation Roundtable.
He was previously the founding director and a co-founder of the Judicial Innovation Fellowship program at Georgetown Law, a consultant for the World Bank on access to justice and technology issues, and a product manager at multiple justice technology startups. He’s also the author of the Justice Tech Download, a weekly industry newsletter. He’s currently a member of the Legal Services Corporation’s Leaders Council and a senior advisor to the AI and Justice Consortium. He received his JD from the University of Oregon School of Law and has a BA in history from Linfield College.
Moderator:
Professor, Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics, Arizona State University
Faculty Fellow, American Bar Foundation
Rebecca L. Sandefur is Professor in the Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics and (by courtesy) in the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University, where she previously served as Director of the Sanford School. Her research focuses on access to civil justice, examining how legal services are delivered and experienced; how civil legal aid systems are organized; the role of pro bono; and the comparative effectiveness, sustainability, and scalability of lawyers, helpers who are not licensed attorneys, and digital tools. She also studies how ordinary people understand and attempt to resolve their justice problems.
Sandefur is a Faculty Fellow at the American Bar Foundation, where she founded the Access to Justice Research Initiative in 2010. She serves on the Arizona Commission on Access to Justice by appointment of the Supreme Court of Arizona. She is co-founder, with Matthew Burnett, of Frontline Justice and the Justice Worker Lab, initiatives dedicated to expanding access to civil legal help through community-based justice workers.
Her honors include a MacArthur Fellowship (2018), the National Center for State Courts’ Warren E. Burger Award (2020), and election to the Sociological Research Association (2024). Born in Oklahoma, she is an enrolled citizen of the Chickasaw Nation.