When Is Law in Action?

In response to Pamela Foohey, When Faith Falls Short: Bankruptcy Decisions of Churches, 76 Ohio St. L.J. 1319 (2015)

What Do We Want! ?

If asked, most Americans would very likely say that they would rather have “justice” than something like “injustice.” And if asked what “justice” means, many would have an answer. Some responses would name abstract ideals from one religious or cultural tradition or another. One of this type that is particularly dear to me speaks of letting the oppressed go free and breaking every yoke. But other answers about the meaning of justice would be more concrete: “my son wouldn’t be in jail”; “I could pay my hospital bills”; “somebody would help me with this problem.” These definitions of justice reflect the reality of our human lives. We don’t live in abstractions. Rather, we live through concrete relationships, in particular places, with specific other people. We encounter many problems in the course of those relationships, some with other human beings and some with big organizations made up of people and rules, like corporations, government agencies, or courts. Very many of those relationships and their challenges are (supposed to be) governed by the law. For most of us, most of the time, justice involves the right resolution of temporal problems that have some legal aspect

Designing Just Solutions at Scale: Lawyerless Legal Services and Evidence-Based Regulation

Around the world, billions of people lack access to justice, often because they cannot access help in resolving their justice issues. An important reason for this is that many access models rely centrally on lawyers, and such models simply cannot scale. Some jurisdictions allow lawyerless legal services. We offer a new framework for understanding lawyerless legal services that breaks away from lawyer-centric logic. Inspired by experiments in reregulating the practice of law in the United States, we propose a paradigm shift: just solutions. A just solutions framework has two distinct characteristics: it is evidence-based and it is outcome-focused. We draw on experience from other lawyerless models to imagine what a just solutions framework could look like in practice, including a growing body of evidence on legal needs and effective services, as well as scalable funding innovations. Freed from the lawyer-centric paradigm, a just solutions framework is closer to people’s actual needs and, unlike the lawyer-centric model, has the potential to scale to meet them. KEYWORDS: Legal services; access to justice; unbundling; regulatory reform; evidence-based policy and practice