The Access to Justice Lab
at Harvard Law School
Feel confident walking into that interview! Raise your hands up, hold your chest high, and, whatever you do, don’t cross your arms as you wait. You want to make sure the pose you’re striking inspires confidence and communicates that confidence to your (hopefully) future employer.
Education reform is tricky no matter the level or issue targeted. But one area of reform subject to fairly constant momentum is Head Start, especially under the Obama Administration. This program, established in 1965, addresses some of the early developmental and school readiness gaps for low-income children, from birth to age five. The million-dollar question (for a many million-dollar program) is: does it work?
If you’ve been following our “Why RCTs?” series, you’ve read about some drastic examples across several fields of study- many in the medical field- where RCTs have turned common knowledge and practices upside down. These examples are meant to be shocking; they show us the very real and serious implications that can follow from not testing interventions at all or with non-randomized interventions. The accounts I’ve highlighted in the series illustrate several things:
As Erika discussed in a previous blog post, triage is integral to the delivery of legal services, and yet there is no research that demonstrates how to triage well in law. Triage is always important (because resources are always finite). But it is absolutely critical when resources are scare and stakes are high. Decades ago, James F. Childress, in the provocatively titled “Who shall live when not all can live,” laid out the moral and logical arguments for different conceptualizations of triage.
[Read more…] about Who shall receive legal services when not all can?
Mastectomies have become more and more openly discussed over the past decade, as celebrities have spoken about their experiences and more women are screened for breast cancer. During their lifetimes, 12% of women in the U.S. will develop invasive breast cancer, and the rate of women choosing mastectomies after a positive diagnosis rose from 2% in 1998 to 11% in 2011. Recently the number of women who have opted for double mastectomies has increased despite recent research showing that the procedure does not improve one’s chances of survival or quality of life.