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.
In the second part of the “Student Voices” series on “no money down” bankruptcies, HLS student Joe Liberman picks up where he left off in the previous blog: exploring possible solutions to the problems of Chapter 13 filings, understanding their tradeoffs, and proposing how we might study them.
The combination of rising debt and inability to pay for legal help has allowed the proliferation of a financially fraught practice: “no money down” bankruptcies. While purporting to help the low income client, these bankruptcies often leave the filer in a worse financial situation because they were ill-suited for Chapter 13 bankruptcy. This post explores the rise of “no money down” bankruptcies and how we can address this access to justice issue.
Do pro se litigants struggle to interpret rules of civil procedure? Or could noncompliance be explained by other access to justice (A2J) barriers? Advocates for pro se litigants often focus on translating the law into plain language. But these efforts fall short of addressing deployability, an individual’s ability to leverage their knowledge of the law in court. Recent research suggests many A2J barriers fall into the latter category.
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.
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.
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.
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.
