Can we do anything about failure to appear in criminal cases? According to Alissa Fishbane, we can, and for once, what we can do is cheap and easy. Her research has shown that low-cost interventions such as redesigning summons and traffic tickets have been highly effective at reducing missed dates, resulting in fewer penalties for defendants, more efficient adjudication, and savings for the justice system as a whole.
Legal information programs aim to support pro se noncitizens navigating the high stakes and extreme inequities of the U.S. system. Given that 63% of all noncitizens and 83% of detained noncitizens proceed without counsel, these programs could act as necessary stopgaps. It is worth delving deeper into the nature of these programs and the evidence that these programs promote access to justice for unrepresented noncitizens navigating the complexities of our immigration system.
Two-thirds of people facing deportation lack legal representation, and 86% of immigrants being detained do not have a lawyer. Without counsel, many will be deported to face persecution or violence – regardless of their legal right to stay. One partial solution may lie in empowering non-lawyers to take a larger role in representing individuals facing deportation.
The OpenJustice project, now just a year since inception, has gained interest due in part to its hot topic: combining access to justice and artificial intelligence. The project addresses whether AI allows volunteer pro bono attorneys and staff to provide legal information and advice (without a traditional attorney-client relationship) more effectively and efficiently than status quo operations, which do not use AI assistance.
Conducting randomized control trials in the law can be a decade-long (or longer) process. Our “Child Welfare” project evaluates whether families with children who face poverty-related legal and social challenges can avoid unnecessary entries into the child welfare system with the assistance of holistic legal services – a combination of social worker services and a traditional attorney-client relationship. The study is five years in the making and still just half-way through completion, but we’re sharing its origin and process anyway.
Come take a listen to Episode 0: Get to Know Us Again. This is an intro episode, but each week we’ll bring you updates on RCTs we’re working on in the field or have completed, ethics around RCTs, interesting people we work with both at the lab and in the field, and study successes and failures.
We’d like to reintroduce ourselves. We’re the Access to Justice (A2J) Lab, a research entity within Harvard Law School, that’s been around since 2016, courtesy of a starter grant from Arnold Ventures (nèe the Laura and John Arnold Foundation). Our mission is to transform law into an evidence-based field. That transformation will likely take decades, so we’re focused on starting a movement.
The Access to Justice Lab has partnered with the Toledo Municipal Court to conduct a randomized control study of the Court’s Community Diversion Program. This randomized control study, supported by Arnold Ventures, is considered the gold standard in empirical research.
Jack Frost’s Boston relative might have covered the city in snow and forced several flight cancellations, but the A2J Lab pushed through with its first “hackathon” on Monday, February 13!
