Access to Justice Lab
at Harvard Law School
Our Vision
Imagine if lawyers, judges, and decision makers used rigorous evidence to design and run the U.S. justice system.
They could:
- Enable far more people, especially those who can’t afford to hire lawyers, to access civil justice;
- Make the criminal justice system fairer and more efficient; and
- Promote the dignity and respect of individuals and families as they encounter the justice system.
The Access to Justice Lab creates and shares the rigorous evidence needed to make these transformations happen.
Theory of Change
Transforming the justice system by:
DESIGNING
access-to-justice interventions and gold-standard, randomized evaluations
IMPLEMENTING
randomized control trials to find out what works for individuals and families in civil and criminal law
SHARING
lessons learned and best practices to transform the system
TRAINING
current and future practitioners, scholars, and judges in research methods and results to increase capacity and support for rigorous empirical methods
By The Numbers
18
Projects in the field
8
Projects in development
18
States in which the A2J Lab has projects
Latest News
Illustrations and Studies Are Not the Same
Recently, we became aware of at least two blog posts (see here and here) lifting passages from, and selectively highlighting a result of, a draft paper the five of us authored. These posts provide a distorted picture of what our paper said and did. The paper is not intended as an analysis of the Public…
How we’re learning more about ways to improve access to justice across the U.S.
We’re closing out 2020 with a bang: We have three new studies in the field. Our amazing partners have worked with us to prepare and launch these projects in the face of the unprecedented challenges posed by COVID-19. Focusing on different topics and in different geographies, these new studies have the potential to improve access…
A2J Lab presents an interim report on the Public Safety Assessment–Decision Making Framework System RCT in Dane County, Wisconsin
Today, the A2J Lab presented the findings from the interim report of the randomized evaluation of the Public Safety Assessment–Decision Making Framework System (PSA-DMF), a pretrial risk assessment tool and related decision-making framework, in Dane County, Wisconsin. The full interim report is now available on the A2J Lab website. The presentation at the Dane County…