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We will never have enough lawyers to serve the civil legal needs of all low and moderate income (LMI) individuals who must navigate civil legal problems. A significant part of the access to justice toolkit must include self-help materials. That much is not new; indeed, the legal aid community has been actively developing pro se guides and forms for decades. But the community has hamstrung its creations in two major ways: first, by focusing these materials almost exclusively on educating LMI individuals about formal law, and second, by considering the task complete once the materials have been made available to self-represented individuals. In particular, modern self-help materials fail to address many psychological and cognitive barriers that prevent LMI individuals from successfully deploying the substance of the materials. In this Article we make two contributions. First, we develop a theory of the obstacles LMI individuals face when attempting to deploy professional legal knowledge.Second, we apply learning from fields as varied as psychology, public health education,artificial intelligence, and marketing to develop a framework for how courts, legal aid organizations, law school clinics, and others might reconceptualize the design and delivery of civil legal materials for unrepresented individuals. We illustrate our framework with examples of reimagined civil legal materials.
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Getting Help
In half of U.S. households, at least one person faces a civil justice problem each year. These problems range from eviction to divorce, benefits denials to neighbor disputes, and medical debt to employment discrimination. Most will never reach a court or even a lawyer—indeed, most will never be solved at all. Unresolved civil legal problems cause financial instability, housing insecurity, and poor mental and physical health—burdens disproportionately borne by Black, Latinx, multiracial, and low-income Americans. Although we know a great deal about the existence and distribution of civil justice problems, we know much less about how to solve them. Doing so requires empirical research about help-seeking: where people go for assistance, why they pursue some resources but avoid others, and whether and how race and class shape patterns of help-seeking. We need solutions that align with everyday people’s lived experiences. This Article investigates help-seeking from the perspective of ordinary people. Its findings can better equip lawyers, justice innovators, and program designers to create novel access to justice solutions from the perspective of ordinary people. Leveraging data from a nationally representative survey, this Article analyzes over 47,000 quantitative responses and 100,000 words of open-ended answers, unearthing powerful findings about how Americans think about getting help when they face a complex, early-stage problem with legal implications: here, an eldercare scenario. People gravitate towards sources they view as experienced and private, and those which offer advice, not information—a crucial distinction in light of legal regulatory regimes. They gravitate away from sources they view as bureaucratic, uncaring, or too extreme; these perceptions hinge on source type. Identities such as political affiliation and religiosity are crucial predictors of help-seeking behavior, denoting a need for diversified outreach strategies to polarized groups. By focusing on help-seeking for early-stage problems, this Article shifts the conversation from the existence of legal needs to laying the empirical groundwork for interventions that center the perspective of ordinary Americans. Doing so will better equip us to forge tools that can stop the corrosive effects of unsolved civil legal problems.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1946520
- PAR ID:
- 10589167
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wisconsin Law Review
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Wisconsin Law Review
- ISSN:
- 1943-1120
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.59015/wlr.UWDQ2395
