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.
Current Solutions Petitioners, most of whom are not lawyers, have to: (1) identify “interested parties,” many of whom are not obvious candidates; (2) determine the proper method of service; (3) effectuate service; and (4) return proof of service to the Probate and Family Court. Completing the process exactly as described is equally important. Service isn’t
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!
Current Solutions Courts, legal services providers, and state and local Bars have responded to the flood of people without lawyers in numerous ways, including: amending ethical rules to legitimate already-existing forms of lawyer representation self-help centers uniform court forms self-help materials technology and non-lawyer representation. In 2015, the Conferences of Chief Judges and State Court Administrators
[su_heading size=”18″]D. James Greiner, Cassandra Wolos Pattanayak, and Jonathan Philip Hennessy, “How Effective are Limited Legal Assistance Programs? A Randomized Experiment in a Massachusetts Housing Court” (2012).[/su_heading] We persuaded entities conducting a civil Gideon pilot program in summary eviction cases to allow us to randomize which potential clients would receive offers of traditional attorney-client relationships
[su_heading size=”18″]D. James Greiner, Cassandra Wolos Pattanayak, and Jonathan Hennessy, “The Limits of Unbundled Legal Assistance: A Randomized Study in a Massachusetts District Court and Prospects for the Future,” 126 Harvard Law Review 901 (2012).[/su_heading] We persuaded entities conducting two civil Gideon pilot programs to randomize which potential clients would receive offers of traditional attorney-client relationships from professional service provider
[su_heading size=”18″]James Greiner and Cassandra Wolos Pattanayak, “Randomized Evaluation in Legal Assistance: What Difference Does Representation (Offer and Actual Use) Make?“, 121 Yale Law Journal 2118 (2011).[/su_heading] We report the results of the first of a series of randomized evaluations of legal assistance programs. This series of evaluations is designed to measure the effect of both an
