From Fordham Urban Law Journal:
Around the country, jurisdictions are exploring new routes to expand access to justice by empowering community justice workers to provide legal services. Though such activities are often regarded as new, some have existed for decades — people without law licenses have long been authorized to provide representation in immigration matters, Tribal courts, and for those incarcerated in prisons and jails, as well as before a wide range of state and federal administrative agencies and other fora.
This paper reviews established community justice worker models that have been serving low-income and excluded communities in the United States for more than 50 years, including accredited immigration representatives, Tribal lay advocates, and jailhouse lawyers and emerging justice worker models advanced in Alaska, Arizona, Delaware, and Utah in the last five years. These real-world activities offer opportunities for learning about what factors make justice work not only effective at resolving people’s justice problems or encouraging their engagement with law, but also what makes justice worker programs sustainable over the long term and scalable to meet the enormous volume of Americans’ unmet legal needs. To encourage that learning, we offer a people-centered and evidence-based framework for designing and evaluating community justice worker models that focus on program effectiveness, scalability, and sustainability.