Limited Legal Assistance

Research: There will never be enough resources to provide full representation to all Alaskans who could use it in civil cases. The question is: Are there other alternatives that could help the residents of Alaska get the support they deserve? Could trained advocates or other non-lawyer supports be part of the solution? This RCT is studying how effective trained advocates are at increasing success in SNAP benefits cases.

The Access to Justice Lab has partnered with Alaska Legal Services Corporation to design a randomized control trial to evaluate community advocates services in the context of the SNAP benefits arm of their program.

What We’ll Learn:

Research Team:
Access to Justice Lab
Alaska Legal Services
Legal Services Funded Corp.

Research: The Financial Distress Research Project is a partnership among multiple branches of government, academia (students and professors), multiple non-profit service providers, and the private sector. People who participate in the project will be a part of a randomized control trial to understand the effectiveness of attorney representation, financial counseling, and self-help materials on financial health outcomes.

What We’ll Learn: A comparison of financial health across our four groups will provide gold-standard evidence regarding the effectiveness of self-help packets, financial counseling, and attorney representation. The result will be the richest and most detailed dataset ever conducted in an evaluation of what works for individuals in financial distress.

Research Team: Jim Greiner, Faculty Director, Access to Justice Lab; Professor of Law, Harvard Law School

Dalié Jiménez, Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine School of Law

Lois R. Lupica, Professor of Law, University of Maine School of Law

Research: Over four decades ago, the United States Supreme Court decided a trio of cases addressing the constitutionality of a court system’s imposition of filing fees without a corresponding in forma pauperis (“IFP”) process. These cases established that a court system could condition access to itself on a would-be litigant’s paying a mandatory (nonwaivable) filing fee, but that the due process clause demanded that courts waive the fee for indigent litigants in cases involving constitutional rights that could be effectuated only by resort to the courts. An example of a right within the exception was divorce, it being a feature of the United States legal system that when two spouses (even if childless and penniless) both affirmatively desire to exercise their constitutional right to terminate their marriage, one must sue the other in a court. The legal subject area in our study, divorce, is the same as that in the Supreme Court’s filing fee cases, and it remains the quintessential example of a constitutional right that can be effectuated
only by resort to the courts.

What if a court imposed other costs on mandatory “costs” on litigants in divorce cases? What if, effectively, a court system demanded that an indigent litigant find a lawyer in order to obtain a divorce?

Study Design: Our study randomized an individual seeking assistance to pursue a divorce to either an effort by a pro bono matching service to find a pro bono attorney to represent her (treated group) or a referral to existing self-help or low bono resources coupled with an offer to answer questions by telephone (control group). Our study partner was the provider of last resort for free legal services in our study site, Philadelphia County: it accepted intakes primarily via referrals from other organizations, and it required that service seekers exhaust all other options.

What We Learned:

Research Team: Jim Greiner, Faculty Director, Access to Justice Lab; Professor of Law, Harvard Law School

Roseanna Sommers, Assistant Professor of Law University of Michigan

Ellen Degnan, Senior Staff Attorney, Southern Poverty Law Center

Thomas Ferriss, Staff Data Scientist, Google

Philadelphia VIP

Resources:

D. James Greiner, Ellen Degnan, Thomas Ferriss, and Roseanna Sommers, “Using random assignment to measure court accessibility for low-income divorce seekers,” PNAS April 6, 2021 118 (14)

Research:

What We Hope to Learn:

Research Team:
Access to Justice Lab
DC Legal Aid
Philadelphia Legal Aid