Ineffective assistance of counsel counts among its more egregious causes lack of preparation, sleeping through trial, and drunkenness. So, what is the legal standard for this incompetence? This “Student Voices” bonus blog examines the Supreme Court’s Strickland and Cronic decisions, their application in capital cases, and potential reforms to provide a more just process for defendants.
The Sixth Amendment right to an impartial jury—particularly for Black defendants facing disproportionately white juries—isn’t always a guarantee. This “Student Voices” blog proposes three reforms to be randomized and studied in real courts, rather than assuming they work, to mitigate possible implicit racial bias in juries.
Law could use a tool like AI to bridge the accessibility gap between practitioners and the pro se litigants attempting to navigate the legal field. In this second post in a two-part series on AI and the unauthorized practice of law (UPL), HLS student Elizabeth Guo outlines six points of argument in favor of AI and against UPL as the tool to regulate AI in legal practice.
To tackle one of the world’s largest backlog of cases awaiting judicial decisions, Brazil’s courts are relying on AI systems to prioritize cases, support legal research, and even draft judicial decisions. The change in process may help address cases much quicker but at what cost? Largely untested in the justice system, AI’s impact deserves rigorous evaluation before deploying it in real-world situations.
In the first of a two-part series on AI and the Unauthorized Practice of Law (UPL), HLS J.D. candidate Elizabeth Guo explores current UPL rules, the challenging definition of “practice of law”, and the reasons why general-purpose AI tools will not likely be tested by UPL rules when it comes to providing legal information.
A Depression-era legal battle between the bar association and auto clubs like AAA pitted the financial interests of lawyers against those of consumers. When the bar won, it not only set forth a future of legal reform controlled by courts rather than lawmakers, it also laid the groundwork for a hundred years of access-to-justice issues that continue to plague the legal profession.
In this episode of Proof Over Precedent, HLS student Spencer Thieme discusses interrogation rooms and the effect of a physical environment on stress, memory, disclosure, and false confessions. She also considers potential randomized controlled trials for studying interrogation room design.
Upsolve is a New York nonprofit attempting to create a program in which non-lawyers give limited legal advice to low- income people in debt collection litigation. The organization would be a boon in helping the roughly 80 percent of defendants failing to appear in debt collection court. The only thing standing in its way? New York’s Unauthorized Practice of Law (UPL) statute. HLS student Ashil Jhaveri charts a legal argument based on UPL’s unconstitutionality that could hopefully move the organization forward.
File this one under “historic laws in need of modernizing.” Civil forfeiture—the act of seizing and forfeiting physical property, regardless of whether an individual has been charged with a crime — has its roots in customs and piracy cases. But today, in addition to serving as a tool to pad police department’s budgets, it more often keeps cars, cash, and possessions out of the hands of potentially innocent individuals with no guarantee of legal representation. The result is an access to justice failure, as reported by HLS student Joe Liberman in this week’s “Student Voices” blog and podcast episode.
In his 2026 State of the Judiciary Address, Hon. Rowan Wilson, Chief Judge of the New York Court of Appeals, took the opportunity to bring attention to one of the state’s most critical access to justice problems: the difficulties families face while navigating New York Family Court. Despite judicial efforts to address families’ underlying social needs, the legislative and executive branches of the state—and in the larger context, the nation—have the responsibility to implement more lasting improvements.
