Friday, December 10, 2021

Measuring Access to Justice

 


I stumbled across two outstanding articles on how to measure Access to Justice.  The first article is a summary posted on Medium.com by Ms. Rachel Wang that analyzes the second by Mr. Hugh McDonald UC Irvine Law Review article titled “Assessing Access to Justice: How Much “Legal” Do People Need and How Can We Know? 

In short, why has it taken this long to ask the questions posed in these articles?




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To give you a flavor as to the breadth of the issues discussed in Mr. McDonald’s article, he writes in the law review summary:

“This Article draws on several access to justice challenges and considers three sources of empirical evidence of individual access to justice and legal need—access to justice and legal needs surveys, justice system administrative data and evaluative research efforts—to examine how empirical legal studies can throw new light on important access to justice questions. 

Without improved ability to monitor and measure legal need, capability and outcomes, ability to assess access to justice, user-centric policy reforms, and learn “what works” to effectively and efficiently meet that legal need is likely to remain stunted.  

How much legal do people need to meet legal needs and enjoy access to justice? And how can we know?”

Being a huge fan of both determining and measuring “what works”, I will end here to say that Ms. Wang’s summary and commentary along with Mr. McDonald’s full article are highly recommended to all our court reform and technology leaders around the world.

The links to the articles are:

https://medium.com/legal-design-and-innovation/how-do-we-measure-access-to-justice-and-improvements-to-it-d1baf790a258 

https://scholarship.law.uci.edu/ucilr/vol11/iss3/6/ 


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