What the Access to Justice Crisis Means for Legal Education

Despite enormous social, legal, and technological shifts in the last century, the structure of legal education has remained largely unchanged. Part of the reason so little change has occurred is that the current model mostly “works”; it produces a professional class of lawyers to populate the ranks of law firms and government entities. At the same time, for decades, legal education researchers have considered it practically axiomatic that law school has room for improvement.In this Article, I argue that the access to justice crisis—a deficit of just resolutions to justiciable civil justice problems for everyday people—compels an overdue examination of legal education’s scope and purpose. If we assume that lawyers should have a major role in solving the access to justice crisis, as opposed to simply meeting individual legal needs, law schools must prepare lawyers to serve this role. I point to three categories of improvement that centering access to justice would necessitate: teaching a greater versatility of thinking and problem-solving, imparting a broader understanding of the ecosystem of justiciable problems and lawyers’ place in it, and structuring law school to impart the cognitive cornerstones needed for successful legal practice.Placing access to justice at the center of legal education would strengthen, not supplant, the traditional model. In addition to equipping lawyers to address everyday Americans’ justice problems, this Article’s proposals would make the legal profession nimbler and more resilient to social, economic, and technological changes, and help overcome some of the profession’s most intractable problems

Understanding the Social and Cognitive Process in Law School that Creates Unhealthy Lawyers

Previous work on law student wellness and mental health strongly suggests that the seeds of professional unhappiness are sown in law school. Law students suffer from anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and other mental health problems at alarmingly high rates. They also leave law school with different concerns, commitments, and cognitive patterns than when they entered, emerging less hopeful, less intrinsically motivated, and more concerned with prestige than they were at the outset. So what, exactly, happens to people in law school? Although a rich body of quantitative and survey-based research on law students documents these empirical trends, surprisingly little qualitative work has examined the social mechanisms and relational processes that underpin the development of negative mental health and wellness patterns. This Article draws on in-depth interviews with fifty-three law students from thirty-six law schools throughout the United States: one interview before the students started law school, then another interview in their first three to six weeks, for a total of 106 interviews with 1L students who entered law school in Fall 2020. Even at this early stage, we can already begin to identify the social and cognitive processes that set the stage for unhealthy professional development

Remorse, Relational Legal Consciousness, and the Reproduction of Carceral Logic

One in seven people in prison in the US is serving a life sentence, and most of these “lifers” will someday be eligible for discretionary parole. But little is known about a key aspect of parole decision-making: remorse assessments. Because remorse is a complex emotion that arises from past wrongdoing and unfolds over time, assessing the sincerity of another person’s remorse is neither a simple task of lie detection, nor of determining emotional authenticity. Instead, remorse involves numerous elements, including the relationship between a person’s past and present motivations, beliefs, and affective states. To understand how parole board members make sense of remorse, we draw on in-depth interviews with parole commissioners in California, the state with the largest proportion of parole-eligible lifers. We find that commissioners’ remorse assessments hinge on their perceptions of lifers’ relationships to law and carceral logic. In this way, relational legal consciousness—specifically, second-order legal consciousness—functions as a stand-in for the impossible task of knowing another person’s heart or mind. We distinguish relational from second-order legal consciousness and argue that understanding how they operate at parole hearings reveals the larger import of relational legal consciousness as a mechanism via which existing power relations are produced and reproduced, bridging the legal consciousness and law and emotion literatures

An Intersectional Examination of U.S. Civil Justice Problems

Millions of Americans face civil justice problems each year, and most of these problems never make it to court, let alone to a legal expert. Although research has established that race and class are associated with a person’s chance of experiencing a civil justice problem, detailed intersectional examinations of everyday people’s justice experiences are largely absent. A more in-depth empirical understanding of the access to justice crisis can equip lawyers, policymakers, and other designers of justice interventions to create higher-impact, more efficient, and bettertargeted programs to meet the justice needs of everyday people. This Article fills a critical gap in the access to justice research. Using data from a representative sample of over 3,600 Americans, we conduct a granular analysis of the factors associated with the most common civil justice problems in the United States. We illuminate the scope of inequities in everyday legal experiences, point to key paths of legal and policy intervention, and show the importance of intersectional factors in understanding diverse needs for access to justice solutions. In addition to investigating how gender, race, age, and class shape people’s chances of facing a civil justice problem, we investigate several less-examined characteristics: queerness, disability, rurality, parental status, and experiences of trauma. These identities turn out to be significantly correlated with civil justice needs as well—independent from, and in addition to, race, class, and gender. We show that the kinds of civil justice problems vulnerable populations face are not always intuitive and often transcend people’s status as members of a particular population. We also use predicted probabilities to reveal enormous disparities in civil justice problems within groups that extant research has generally treated as monolithic—for example, showing that accounting for other identities and experiences can predict whether a low-income Black American has a 6% chance or a 45% chance of facing a family structure problem in the past year. To shrink the U.S. civil justice gap, we need a more detailed picture of the landscape of civil justice problems experienced by everyday Americans. This Article provides that picture and is intended to serve as a springboard for access to justice policy reform

An Intersectional Examination of U.S. Civil Justice Problems

Millions of Americans face civil justice problems each year, and most of these problems never make it to court, let alone to a legal expert. Although research has established that race and class are associated with a person’s chance of experiencing a civil justice problem, detailed intersectional examinations of everyday people’s justice experiences are largely absent. A more in-depth empirical understanding of the access to justice crisis can equip lawyers, policymakers, and other designers of justice interventions to create higher-impact, more efficient, and better- targeted programs to meet the justice needs of everyday people. This Article fills a critical gap in the access to justice research. Using data from a representative sample of over 3,600 Americans, we conduct a granular analysis of the factors associated with the most common civil justice problems in the United States. We illuminate the scope of inequities in everyday legal experiences, point to key paths of legal and policy intervention, and show the importance of intersectional factors in understanding diverse needs for access to justice solutions. In addition to investigating how gender, race, age, and class shape people’s chances of facing a civil justice problem, we investigate several less-examined characteristics: queerness, disability, rurality, parental status, and experiences of trauma. These identities turn out to be significantly correlated with civil justice needs as well—independent from, and in addition to, race, class, and gender. We show that the kinds of civil justice problems vulnerable populations face are not always intuitive and often transcend people’s status as members of a particular population. We also use predicted probabilities to reveal enormous disparities in civil justice problems within groups that extant research has generally treated as monolithic—for example, showing that accounting for other identities and experiences can predict whether a low-income Black American has a 6% chance or a 45% chance of facing a family structure problem in the past year. To shrink the U.S. civil justice gap, we need a more detailed picture of the landscape of civil justice problems experienced by everyday Americans. This Article provides that picture and is intended to serve as a springboard for access to justice policy reform

What the Access to Justice Crisis Means for Legal Education

Despite enormous social, legal, and technological shifts in the last century, the structure of legal education has remained largely unchanged. Part of the reason so little change has occurred is that the current model mostly “works”; it produces a professional class of lawyers to populate the ranks of law firms and government entities. At the same time, for decades, legal education researchers have considered it practically axiomatic that law school has room for improvement. In this Article, I argue that the access to justice crisis—a deficit of just resolutions to justiciable civil justice problems for everyday people—compels an overdue examination of legal education’s scope and purpose. If we assume that lawyers should have a major role in solving the access to justice crisis, as opposed to simply meeting individual legal needs, law schools must prepare lawyers to serve this role. I point to three categories of improvement that centering access to justice would necessitate: teaching a greater versatility of thinking and problem-solving, imparting a broader understanding of the ecosystem of justiciable problems and lawyers’ place in it, and structuring law school to impart the cognitive cornerstones needed for successful legal practice. Placing access to justice at the center of legal education would strengthen, not supplant, the traditional model. In addition to equipping lawyers to address everyday Americans’ justice problems, this Article’s proposals would make the legal profession nimbler and more resilient to social, economic, and technological changes, and help overcome some of the profession’s most intractable problems

Understanding the Social and Cognitive Process in Law School that Creates Unhealthy Lawyers

Previous work on law student wellness and mental health strongly suggests that the seeds of professional unhappiness are sown in law school. Law students suffer from anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and other mental health problems at alarmingly high rates. They also leave law school with different concerns, commitments, and cognitive patterns than when they entered, emerging less hopeful, less intrinsically motivated, and more concerned with prestige than they were at the outset. So what, exactly, happens to people in law school? Although a rich body of quantitative and survey-based research on law students documents these empirical trends, surprisingly little qualitative work has examined the social mechanisms and relational processes that underpin the development of negative mental health and wellness patterns. This Article draws on in-depth interviews with fifty-three law students from thirty-six law schools throughout the United States: one interview before the students started law school, then another interview in their first three to six weeks, for a total of 106 interviews with 1L students who entered law school in Fall 2020. Even at this early stage, we can already begin to identify the social and cognitive processes that set the stage for unhealthy professional development

What the Access to Justice Crisis Means for Legal Education

Despite enormous social, legal, and technological shifts in the last century, the structure of legal education has remained largely unchanged. Part of the reason so little change has occurred is that the current model mostly “works”; it produces a professional class of lawyers to populate the ranks of law firms and government entities. At the same time, for decades, legal education researchers have considered it practically axiomatic that law school has room for improvement.In this Article, I argue that the access to justice crisis—a deficit of just resolutions to justiciable civil justice problems for everyday people—compels an overdue examination of legal education’s scope and purpose. If we assume that lawyers should have a major role in solving the access to justice crisis, as opposed to simply meeting individual legal needs, law schools must prepare lawyers to serve this role. I point to three categories of improvement that centering access to justice would necessitate: teaching a greater versatility of thinking and problem-solving, imparting a broader understanding of the ecosystem of justiciable problems and lawyers’ place in it, and structuring law school to impart the cognitive cornerstones needed for successful legal practice.Placing access to justice at the center of legal education would strengthen, not supplant, the traditional model. In addition to equipping lawyers to address everyday Americans’ justice problems, this Article’s proposals would make the legal profession nimbler and more resilient to social, economic, and technological changes, and help overcome some of the profession’s most intractable problems

Parole Hearings and Victims\u27 Rights: Implementation, Ambiguity, and Reform

Despite the increasing recognition of victims\u27 rights, and despite the large role parole hearings play in the criminal justice system, discussion of the intersection between these two issues has been curiously sparse. Across the United States, victim participation in parole hearings is currently expanding, yet little is known about how this participation operates on the ground. This Article uses a Calfornia victims\u27 rights initiative called Marsy\u27s Law to think critically about the role that crime victims and their loved ones should play in parole hearings. I use in-depth interviews with California releasing authorities to describe the implementation of Marsy\u27s Law and its effects on parole hearings for lifer inmates. While this Article details victims\u27 actual participation in the parole process, it is even more usefully read as an article about how we think about victims\u27 participation in parole. To this end, victims\u27 rights are relevant both as individual legal entitlements and as broader political objectives. Toward the end of this Article, I identify several areas of possible policy reform with national implications. The data and analysis reveal an urgent need to identify the true purposes of victim testimony and align these purposes with parole hearing procedures. I argue that hearings could be better tailored to meet the most pressing needs of releasing authorities, offenders, and victims themselves