Law Commons^™

Medical-Legal Partnership As A Model For Access To Justice, Yael Cannon

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The United States is plagued with a “justice gap” that leaves many Americans with unmet civil legal needs. Americans with low income do not receive the legal help they require for as many as 92% of their substantive civil legal problems. The justice gap requires many legal aid agencies to triage, becoming “emergency rooms” for clients with unmet legal needs. This national crisis calls for new innovations so that access to justice (A2J) can function more like primary care, promoting better use of resources and preventing legal crises that can cause long-lasting harm.

Medical-Legal Partnerships (MLPs) embed lawyers in healthcare …

Unmet Legal Needs As Health Injustice, Yael Cannon

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In a seminal report in 2006, the American Bar Association recognized that millions of low-income Americans have civil legal issues that go unaddressed, jeopardizing their fundamental and basic human needs for shelter, sustenance, safety, family stability, and access to health care. The pandemic has only exacerbated this crisis. When rights in these areas go unenforced for Americans marginalized by poverty and race, their health can suffer, compounding health inequities. The fundamental civil legal needs of low-income Americans must be addressed in order to ensure health equity. This Article argues that unmet fundamental legal needs serve as determinants of health and …

Co-Creating A Legal Check-Up In A School-Based Health Center Serving Low-Income Adolescents, Lisa Kessler, Yael Cannon, Nicole Tuchinda, Ana Caskin, Christina Balz Ndjatou, Vicki W. Girard, Deborah F. Perry

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Problem: Marginalized populations experience health-harming legal needs—barriers to good health that require legal advocacy to overcome. Medical–legal partnerships (MLPs) embed lawyers into the healthcare team to resolve these issues, but identifying patients with health-harming legal needs is complex, and screening practices vary across MLPs.

Purpose of Article: Academic and community partners who collaborate in an MLP at a school-based health center (SBHC) share their process of co-creating a two-stage legal check-up for adolescents.

Key Points: Screening adolescents for health-harming legal needs is challenging. It took ongoing collaboration to refine the process to fit the needs of …

Setting The Health Justice Agenda: Addressing Health Inequity & Injustice In The Post-Pandemic Clinic, Emily Benfer, James Bhandary-Alexander, Yael Cannon, Medha Makhlouf, Tomar Pierson-Brown

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The COVID-19 pandemic surfaced and deepened entrenched preexisting health injustice in the United States. Racialized, marginalized, poor, and hyper-exploited populations suffered disproportionately negative outcomes due to the pandemic. The structures that generate and sustain health inequity in the United States—including in access to justice, housing, health care, employment, and education—have produced predictably disparate results. The authors, law school clinicians and professors involved with medical-legal partnerships, discuss the lessons learned by employing a health justice framework in teaching students to address issues of health inequity during the pandemic. The goal of health justice is to eliminate health disparities that are linked …

Closing The Health Justice Gap: Access To Justice In Furtherance Of Health Equity, Yael Cannon

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

A massive civil “justice gap” plagues the United States. Every day, low-income Americans—and disproportionately people of color—go without the legal information and representation they need to enforce their rights. This can cost them their homes, jobs, food security, or children. But unmet civil legal needs in housing, employment, and public benefits, for example, are not simply injustices—they are well-documented drivers of poor health, or social determinants of health. Those marginalized by virtue of both race and socioeconomic status are particularly harmed by inaccessibility to justice and also by chronic health conditions and lower life expectancy. When a tenant walks into …

Injustice Is An Underlying Condition, Yael Cannon

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Race, poverty, and zip code serve as critical determinants of a person's health. Research showed the links between these factors and poor health and mortality before COVID-19, and they have only been amplified during this pandemic.

People of color experience higher rates of asthma, heart disease, diabetes, and other chronic conditions. People of color who live in poverty are even more likely to suffer from poor health; they face a “double burden” of health disparities associated with both racial and socioeconomic marginalization. Neighborhoods with concentrated poverty and with residents who are primarily people of color have even faced a life …

An Interprofessional Approach To Teaching Advocacy Skills: Lessons From An Academic Medical-Legal Partnership, Vicki W. Girard, Eileen S. Moore, Lisa P. Kessler, Deborah F. Perry, Yael Cannon

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Medical students and educators recognize that preparing the next generation of health leaders to address seemingly intractable problems like health disparities should include advocacy training. Opportunities to acquire the knowledge and skills needed to effectively advocate at the policy level to promote systems-, community-, and population-level solutions are a critical component of such training. But formal advocacy training programs that develop and measure such skills are scarce. Even less common are interprofessional advocacy training programs that include legal and policy experts to help medical students learn such skills.

This 2016–2017 pilot study started with a legislative advocacy training program for …