As many as 120 million legal issues go unresolved annually in the United States, underscoring a critical shortfall in traditional, lawyer-centric approaches to access to justice. This issue, however, extends beyond just legal services, positing the need for a paradigm shift in terms of who can offer legal assistance. This episode of LawNext, hosted by Bob Ambrogi, delves into this pressing subject with insights from two of the nation’s prominent figures in access to justice research: Rebecca Sandefur and Matthew Burnett.
Sandefur and Burnett, co-founders of Frontline Justice, argue that the crisis of access to justice is inherently a crisis of democracy. They propose that by training community members as “justice workers,” individuals can be empowered to guide their neighbors through legal challenges. Their research, presented in a recent article in the South Carolina Law Review, titled “Justice Work as Democracy Work: Reimagining Access to Justice as Democratization,” provides compelling circumstances to consider this transformative approach. In Alaska, for example, nearly 200 community justice workers operate across more than 40 rural communities, realizing a 1-to-25 return on investment and expanding the reach of legal aid significantly.
The discussion extends to include evidence supporting the effectiveness of justice workers, with data from the UK indicating that trained non-lawyers often excel in specific tasks that traditionally fall within the remit of trained attorneys. Sandefur and Burnett also touch on recent breakthroughs—such as the backing from both the Conference of Chief Justices and the American Bar Association—which signal new momentum for this democratized approach. Yet, they note the existing barriers, including the deeply entrenched monopoly the legal profession holds over the justice system. Justice workers, they suggest, hold the potential to not only broaden access to legal help but also enhance participatory democracy.
For those interested in exploring these insights further, the full LawNext episode provides an in-depth analysis of this novel initiative and its implications for the future of legal services.