Abstract. The core of the access-to-justice problem is widespread unmet civil legal needs coupled with general disuse of the civil legal system. This Essay posits that monetary sanctions are an important contributing factor to the problem of access to justice. First, monetary sanctions and the unpaid criminal legal debt they produce are engines of “legal…
As part of Stanford Law Review's 2023 Symposium on Access to Justice, this Essay explains how medical-legal partnerships--community-based programs that embed lawyers within healthcare teams--offer a promising model to address our country's justice gap. By using trusted institutions to connect people to the resources they need and embracing a bottom-up "patients-to-policy" approach, medical legal partnerships demonstrate how interdisciplinary collaborations can effect transformative change and advance substantive justice.
Part of Stanford Law Review's 2023 Symposium on Access to Justice, this Essay explores how lawyerless state civil courts operate in unique ways, countering conventional understandings of how law is developed in a court system. The Essay highlights how patterns of law development within state trial courts can either counter or reinforce inequality, and how important it is for scholars and policymakers to first understand how these courts, which are integral to our system, work.
