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.
For a child, parental incarceration is a legal gateway into the child welfare system. Parents have rights to participate in custody proceedings, but incarceration erects barriers that can make meaningful participation difficult. In this “Student Voices” post, we look at the current system–one in eight incarcerated parents lose their parental rights–and potential solutions to these barriers that, if left unchecked, can effectively lock incarcerated parents out of the child welfare process.
If law could follow medicine to better the field and those working in it, we could see standardized case tests coming to measure lawyers’ decision-making abilities. That’s the argument made by HLS J.D. candidate Michael Pusic in this bonus Proof Over Precedent post. Multiple-choice case evaluations could objectively assess lawyers’ decision-making, improve training and hiring, and determine best use of legal assistance.
Eight hundred families in Illinois–and the researchers working with them–are about to find out. With monthly cash gifts of varying denominations dependent on family size and local cost of living, participants of the EmPwR Study will gain firsthand knowledge of whether a year of guaranteed income will stave off child welfare involvement. HLS J.D. candidate Julia Saltzman examines the relationship between poverty and family regulation system involvement and shares details on the randomized controlled trial taking place in urban, suburban, and rural communities in Illinois.
The pervasiveness of AI has every industry looking closely at it. But are public perceptions of AI equal across industries? In this “Student Voices” blog, HLS J.D. candidate Strong Ma compares law and medicine, examining the different views of fairness when an algorithm, and not a human, makes a decision.
“Replacing cash bail: Fairer justice or robopocalypse?” This headline from a 2020 California news article encapsulates the rhetoric at the time surrounding Proposition 25, a California referendum to eliminate cash bail and provide judges making pretrial release decisions with a risk assessment instrument.
The association of ending cash bail with algorithmic decision-making embodies a complexity that members of the bail reform movement everywhere can examine in future efforts to bring greater access to justice for pretrial detainees.
