In the contemporary United States, civil justice problems are widespread. Just how widespread cannot be known, as the most recent comprehensive national survey of public experience with civil justice problems and institutions is thirty-five years old. In the U.S., these common problems affect as many as 150 million people each year, and have potentially wide-ranging and powerful impacts on core areas of life such as livelihood, shelter, the care and custody of minor children and dependent adults, neighborhood safety, and environmental conditions. Despite the fact that most of these problems never reach the formal justice system, courts are often overwhelmed by the numbers of civil litigants. Local, state, and federal governments, generous individuals, and private foundations contribute more than 1 billion dollars each year to fund civil legal assistance for low- and moderate-income people, but because we lack research on this topic, we know little about how this activity is organized, what services this funding supports, how existing programs do their work, and whether outreach efforts adequately understand and address the most common barriers to access to these services. Little high quality, publicly available data exist to stimulate theory, engage scholarship, and guide policy on issues of access to justice. This project is a workshop convening scholars and practitioners to develop and begin work on a new research agenda for access to civil justice. Invitees 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.
Over the period of the award, 2012-2014, the "Access to Civil Justice: Re-envisioning and Reinvigorating Research" workshop convened scholars and practitioners to develop and begin work on a new research agenda for access to civil justice (A2J), bringing together academic scholars with practitioners who hold a variety of institutional roles in the civil justice system. The workshop facilitated intellectual cross- fertilization and jump-started streams of research that are producing new, fundamental understanding of pressing contemporary problems in access to justice. These challenges include the thousands of Americans who each year must face civil court proceedings without the assistance of attorneys and the millions of Americans who confront justice problems affecting their livelihood, finances or housing but do not realize that these problems have legal aspects. The diversity of perspective, training, and institutional role represented in participants was a key strength of the events, which drew together disparate strands of inquiry and interest with implications for understanding and improving access to civil justice in the United States. On December 7, 2012, the American Bar Foundation (ABF), working with the National Legal Aid and Defender Association (NLADA), hosted a poster session and open town hall meeting at the Chicago meetings of the NLADA and a smaller workshop on the downtown campus of Northwestern University. The Poster Session attracted 24 presentations, on a wide range of topics, including court process, web-based pro bono support, the access to justice research needs of federal agencies, and access to justice research currently underway with NSF support. The poster session was well-attended and immediately followed by an open town hall-style meeting attended by over 80 people, most of them field professionals of different types (for example, judges, legal aid attorneys, CEOs of legally oriented non-profit organizations, managers of court-based self-help programs). The discussion centered on two main themes: (1) the research needs of field professionals and their organizations and (2) concerns that field professionals had about opening their activities to research and about the uses to which research might be put. The Town Hall was quite successful in achieving a mutual education of two groups who do not often talk with each other, those who work to deliver justice to the public and empirical justice researchers. The following day, December 8, 2012, the workshop convened 44 participants from courts, academia, legal services, research institutes, the private bar and the organized bar, representing, all regions of the country and many groups in the population, and ranging in career stage from PhD students to sitting judges. The group worked strenuously through a two part agenda: Identifying the most pressing research questions concerning access to justice and the delivery of legal services; and, identifying the national infrastructure and capacities that would make conducting that research possible and how these capacities might be created. A third, smaller workshop met on November 15, 2013 at the American Bar Foundation. It assisted 6 teams of scholars and field professionals in developing and polishing proposals for submission to research funders. Ranging from investigations of judicial behavior to the impact of counsel to rural access to justice in Indian Country, these projects all involve collaborations between field professionals and academic researchers. Working together and with researchers at the ABF, the teams spent an intense day improving their projects. Four of these projects have received funding and are currently underway. The workshop funded by the National Science Foundation generated new scholarly activity, new synergies between researchers and practitioners, and new resources for the general public, including: Facilitating new partnerships between scholars and practitioners that are producing new knowledge about access to justice. Supporting projects that have sought funding for new research. Three have been successful in seeking funding from NSF, one sought and received funding from another source, and one is still awaiting the results of NSF review. Contributing to the development of a collaborative on-line resource that makes scholarly research on A2J topics easily available to field professionals and the public (legalaidresarch.org). Sparking creation of two new multi-meeting groups that continue work on the workshop’s goals. One network is led by a workshop alumna and is a forum for the development and improvement of empirical A2J research projects. The other brings together a diverse range of field professionals and practitioners with scholars and is focused on enriching and generating A2J research and policy in the Southern region of the United States.
