Law Commons^™

Helping Self-Represented Litigants Isn’T Charity Work, It’S A Professional Obligation, Suzanne Harrington-Steppen, Eliza Vorenberg

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Overreach Of Limits On 'Legal Advice', Lauren Sudeall

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Nonlawyers, including court personnel, are typically prohibited from providing legal advice. But definitions of “legal advice” are unnecessarily broad, creating confusion, disadvantaging self-represented litigants, and possibly raising due process concerns. This Essay argues for a narrower, more explicit definition of legal advice that advances, rather than undercuts, access to justice.

Changing Every Wrong Door Into The Right One: Reforming Legal Services Intake To Empower Clients, Jabeen Adawi

Articles

It’s recognized that people affected by poverty often have numerous overlapping legal needs and despite the proliferation of legal services, they are unable to receive full assistance. When a person is faced with a legal emergency, rarely is there an equivalent to a hospital’s emergency room wherein they receive an immediate diagnosis for their needs and subsequent assistance. In this paper, I focus on the process a person goes through to find assistance and argue that it is a burdensome, and demoralizing task of navigating varying protocols, procedures, and individuals. While these systems are well intentioned from the lawyer’s perspective, …

Ethical Concerns In Court-Connected Online Dispute Resolution, Dorcas Quek Anderson

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

This article examines the burgeoning trend of creating court ODR systems, focusing on the design aspects that are likely to raise ethical challenges. It discusses four salient questions to be considered when designing a court ODR system, and the resulting ethical tensions that are brought to the fore. As a fourth party, the ODR system not only replaces existing court functions, but enlarges the scope of the courts’ intervention in disputes and increases the courts’ interface with the user. Furthermore, certain ethical principles such as transparency, accountability, impartiality and fairness take on greater significance in the court context than in …

Testimony On Third Party Financing Of Lawsuits, Maya Steinitz

Faculty Scholarship

In this written testimony, Professor Steinitz addresses bills pending in the New York State Senate and Assembly relating to consumer litigation finance. Among other things, she suggests (1) establishing a “Minimum Payment” for plaintiffs, instead of (or in addition to) flat rates or interest caps; and (2) defining the scope of application by applying an “Unsophisticated Plaintiff” test rather than by focusing on the financing amount. She also addresses other matters implicated by the bills such as whether lawyers should be permitted to provide financial advice, prohibition of prepayment penalties, registration requirements, and right of rescission in the context of …

Legal Deserts, Lauren Sudeall, Lise R. Pruitt, Danielle M. Conway, Michele Statz, Hannah Haksgaard, Amanda L. Kool

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Rural America faces an increasingly dire access-to-justice crisis, which serves to exacerbate the already disproportionate share of social problems afflicting rural areas. One critical aspect of the crisis is the dearth of information and research regarding the extent of the problem and its impacts. This Article begins to fill that gap by providing surveys of rural access to justice in six geographically, demographically, and economically varied states: California, Georgia, Maine, Minnesota, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. In addition to providing insights about the distinct rural challenges confronting each of these states, the legal resources available, and existing policy responses, the Article …

Adr And Access To Justice: Current Perspectives, Rory Van Loo, Ellen E. Deason, Michael Z. Green, Donna Shestowsky, Ellen Waldman

Faculty Scholarship

Access to justice is a broad topic, and we cannot cover everything. You will notice a few major omissions. Most notably, we are not going to emphasize consumer pre-dispute arbitration agreements. This is not because they are not important, but because much has been written and said on this topic, and it could easily swallow the whole discussion. Also, we are probably not going to say very much about restorative justice, and I am sure you will notice some other holes. We invite you to raise missing issues in your comments.

Let me start with a few opening remarks. We …

Celebrating Mundane Conflict, Deborah J. Cantrell

Publications

This Article interrogates the dominant conception of conflict and challenges the narrative of conflict as hard, difficult and painful to engage. The Article reveals two primary framing errors that cause one to misperceive how ubiquitous and ordinary is conflict. The first error is to misperceive conflict as categorical — something either is a conflict or it is not. People make that error as a way of trying to avoid conflict. People falsely hope that there might be a category of “not conflict,” like disagreements, that will be easier to navigate. The second error is to misperceive the world and individuals …

Leveraging Academic Law Libraries To Expand Access To Justice, Paul Jerome Mclaughlin Jr.

Library Faculty Publications

Academic law libraries are in a unique position to help citizens gain access to the court system and legal information. By creating clinics that focus on helping pro se patrons find and complete legal forms, academic law libraries would not only benefit their schools but also the justice system.

'No Money Down' Bankruptcy, Pamela Foohey, Robert M. Lawless, Katherine Porter, Deborah Thorne

Scholarly Works

This Article reports on a breakdown in access to justice in bankruptcy, a system from which one million Americans will seek help this year. A crucial decision for these consumers will be whether to file a chapter 7 or chapter 13 bankruptcy. Nearly every aspect of their bankruptcies — both the benefits and the burdens of debt relief — will be different in chapter 7 versus chapter 13. Almost all consumers will hire a bankruptcy attorney. Because they must pay their attorneys, many consumers will file chapter 13 to finance their access to the law, rather than because they prefer …

Envisioning 100% Access To Justice In Colorado, Daniel M. Taubman, Melissa Hart

Publications

No abstract provided.

Domestic Violence And The Politics Of Self-Help, Elizabeth L. Macdowell

Scholarly Works

Self-help programs are conceptualized as alternatives to attorney representation that can help both courts and unrepresented litigants. The rhetoric of self-help also typically includes empowering unrepresented individuals to help themselves. But how do self-help programs respond to litigants’ efforts at self-advocacy? This Article reports findings from a study of courthouse self-help programs assisting unrepresented litigants applying for protection orders. The central finding is that self-help staff members were not neutral in the provision of services despite a professed ethic of neutrality. Using the sociological concept of demeanor, this Article shows that staff members rewarded protection order applicants who conformed to …

Newsroom: Margulies On 'Ghostwriting', Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Bridging The Gap Between Unmet Legal Needs And An Oversupply Of Lawyers: Creating Neighborhood Law Offices - The Philadelphia Experiment, Jules Lobel, Matthew Chapman

Articles

In the United States there is, simultaneously, an abundance of unemployed lawyers and a significant unmet need for legal care among middle-class households. This unfortunate paradox is protected by ideological, cultural, and practical paradigms both inside the legal community and out. These paradigms include the legal chase for prestige, the consumer’s inability to recognize a legal need, and the growing mountain of debt new lawyers enter the profession with. This article will discuss a very successful National Lawyers Guild experiment from 1930s-era Philadelphia that addressed a similar situation, in a time with similar paradigms, by emphasizing community-connected lawyering. That is, …

In Search Of Core Values, W. Bradley Wendel

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

A consensus appears to have emerged among American lawyers that globalization and information technology are transforming the practice of law in fundamental ways. In particular, non-lawyers are increasingly involved in what has traditionally been defined as the practice of law. Scholars such as Richard Susskind, in the United Kingdom, and Thomas Morgan, in the United States, have hypothesized that lawyers may be going the way of wheelwrights, cordwainers or mercers (traders in fine cloths and silks), and that one day in the not-so-distant future we will consider the profession of lawyer as something to be studied historically, wonder why lawyers …

Clinical Professors' Professional Responsibility: Preparing Law Students To Embrace Pro Bono, Douglas L. Colbert

Faculty Scholarship

This article begins by examining the current crisis in the U.S. legal system where approximately three out of four low- and middle-income litigants are denied access to counsel's representation when faced with the loss of essential rights - -a home, child custody, liberty and deportation - - and where most lawyers decline to fulfill their ethical responsibility of pro bono service to those who cannot afford private counsel. The article traces the evolving ethical standards of a lawyer's professional responsibility that today views every attorney as a public citizen having a special responsibility to the quality of justice.

The author …

Lawyers As Quasi-Public Actors, W. Bradley Wendel

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This paper was written for a panel on access to justice at the 100th anniversary conference of the Law Society of Alberta, Canada. In it I argue that the debate over access to justice, which in the United States generally means pro bono representation provided by individual lawyers, cannot be divorced from broader theoretical debates about the lawyer's role. My claim is that lawyers are quasi-public actors, in the sense that they have some responsibility to aim directly at justice in their representation of clients, and cannot rely only on indirect strategies to ensure that justice is served. The argument …

The Obligation Of Legal Aid Lawyers To Champion Practice By Nonlawyers, Deborah J. Cantrell

Publications

No abstract provided.