Justice : Legal Services for the 21st Century

Making Justice Accessible is a multi-year, multi-phase project designed to explore, better understand, and help address the civil justice gap that exists between the supply and demand for civil legal services in America.

The scholars, practitioners, champions, and policymakers working on the Making Justice Accessible project sought to assess the extent unmet needs, identify the primary causes of the problem, highlight innovative solutions, and recommend nationwide improvements. The data work was led by Mark Hansen and Rebecca Sandefur. Kenneth Frazier, John Levi, and Martha Minow led the design work.

The project produced an explainer video about the civil justice gap and four publications, which are online in their entirety:

• An issue of Daedalus (the Academy’s quarterly journal), Access to Justice, includes 24 essays about the civil legal services crisis facing poor and low-income Americans: from the challenges of providing quality assistance to more people, to the social and economic costs of an often unresponsive legal system, to the opportunities for improvement offered by new technologies, professional innovations, and fresh approaches to the justice gap.
• A paper, Measuring Civil Justice for All, provides a blueprint for the collection of data about civil justice activity in the United States. It also describes a range of data access standards that would help to guide the use of civil justice data for administrative and research purposes.
• The report Civil Justice for All proposes nationwide recommendations to close the gap so that Americans, irrespective of income, have access to legal advice and assistance when they need it most. The recommendations and innovative approaches are rooted in four categories of civil legal problems: family, health care, housing, and veterans affairs.
• The recommendations in Advancing Civil Justice were developed through research, data analysis, and convenings involving a range of participants across the Academy’s Making Justice Accessible projects. It provides specific examples and an overview of opportunities to increase access to justice for all Americans.

The project is dedicated to sharing the research and recommendations to advance awareness of the civil justice gap; increase connectedness among leaders, institutions, and philanthropy to support collaboration on behalf of civil legal services; and fundamentally expand access to justice.