And we’re back with our Top 10 A2J Research Priorities YouTube series! This time, Faculty Director Jim Greiner talks about triage in the civil context.
As a reminder, we at the Lab have come up with a list of what we consider to be the top 10 access to justice research priorities. This list will be published weekly on our YouTube channel, in quick 2-3 minute videos to wake you up and get you excited about how ripe the field of access to justice is for experimentation, research, and, of course, RCTs.
Here’s our second installment:
Interesting series. At around minute 2:05–the speaker says: We need to figure out how to do triage to maximize our resources–and posits this where research will help. Question–who is the royal “we”? And also, is not the question: “how do we best allocate resources to have the most impact for the person being helped ( a population, an income level, a type of case?”. If not, then the question presumes that only the goals and objectives of the organization providing the services matters and not those of the person/groups being helped. Another comment, in law we do know what works best and what does not–but this is highly localized knowledge–based on highly localized factors like resources available in that county, city, and maybe state. We don’t have is comparable/uniform statistics and standard uniform metrics–that would help us generalize and understand across locations and variables/factors that lead to better outcomes and help us understand when resources are best used. So it there is knowledge–researchers are not starting from scratch. The Justice Index is starting to develop some national uniform metrics–but those don’t include outcomes or population specific metrics. So, lets be clear on the state of the research. It is not an empty field–it is incomplete, local, and not uniform–but it is not null. And it might be hard to find–because it is not published as a matter of routine.