While specialized “problem-solving” courts have become common, there is still no equivalent civil mental health court in Massachusetts to handle complex issues like civil commitment and involuntary psychiatric treatment. The gap exposes the potential for the Commonwealth to learn from other states leading reform of the civil judicial system in this area and to pilot such a court and evaluate its impact through a randomized controlled trial.
Rogers hearings, the Massachusetts ruling designed to protect patient autonomy in involuntary psychiatric treatment, often cause harmful delays in treatment. Two reforms that propose shifting responsibility to Administrative Law Judges and to mental health professionals respectively, however, could help bring timely treatment and better advocacy.
In Massachusetts, involuntarily committed psychiatric patients with schizophrenia often face systemic barriers to timely treatment from procedural inefficiencies that prioritize legal formalities over patient well-being. To address this access to justice challenge, the Commonwealth could implement reforms to streamline the legal process while preserving patient rights.
Government websites, when effective, can make the process of filing for bankruptcy, divorce, restraining orders and other common legal requests easier. Unfortunately, the quality of these websites varies significantly with many state and federal sites’ lack of accessibility reflecting limited access to justice for their users. Fixing these websites is a relatively easy and inexpensive method to expand accessibility to court systems and services, provided the willpower is there.
The landmark court decision in Gideon v. Wainwright from 1963 made it a constitutional right, both in federal and state courts, for criminal defendants to have the right to counsel. That decision does not extend to civil cases– such as child custody, eviction, and domestic violences cases–which affect women, often from marginalized backgrounds, more than than men. HLS student Laura Aquino argues for a study to address the gender bias in denying legal assistance to civil litigants that may play a role in preserving a system that limits access to justice for women.
With this housing insecurity having potentially numerous contributing factors, the Access to Justice Lab and research partners at the University of Houston Law Center targeted legal literacy as a potential key to addressing housing evictions in its recently completed pilot study.
Law is a millennium behind medicine (give or take a few centuries). While medicine has evolved into a science-based discipline with rigorous empirical standards, law still operates on precedent, rhetoric, and theory untethered to scientific evidence. It doesn’t have to be that way. There is nothing so unique about the practice of law that makes it immune to data. Why should law, unlike every other discipline, not submit itself to math and science?
Across the country, courthouse cell phone bans pose a significant barrier to entry to the legal system. HLS J.D. candidate Andrew Reed argues that in attempting to maintain a respectful atmosphere and protect privacy with cellphone bans, courthouses have inadvertently made access to justice less attainable for many, including pro se litigants.
When one court system in the U.S. clashed internally over the best medium to hear family law cases, they sought out a randomized control trial for the answer. That A2J Lab study, initiated in 2021, is nearing the end of its evaluation of online versus in-person family law hearings, focusing on self-represented litigants.
The COVID-19 pandemic thrust online court into a mainstream alternative to traditional in-person court hearings. Zoom has shown mixed results, both in its ability to capture the needs of a court hearing (including sticky notes passed between attorneys and clients) and its role in reducing failure to appear rates in court. This makes online court a prime candidate for a randomized control trial to test its impact on court appearances.
