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Abel on Evidence-Based Access to Justice

By Lawrence Solum

Laura Abel (Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law) has posted Evidence-Based Access to Justice (University of Pennsylvania Journal of Law & Social Change, Forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

An evidence-based approach is notably absent from the many efforts to expand access to the justice system for civil litigants, and there is no generally accepted metric for evaluating which access to justice tool works when. This article proposes the use of controlled, randomized experiments to evaluate whether a particular access to justice intervention leads to the same rate of wins and losses as full and competent attorney representation. It also describes a second metric for assessing the fairness of proceedings in which a particular access to justice intervention is used: whether the intervention provides litigants with the ability to adequately perform all tasks they would need to perform to enable the judge to reach a fair and accurate decision.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on June 30, 2010 (boomark / email).