WORKSHOP: Access to Civil Justice: Re-envisioning and Reinvigorating Research, Chicago, IL, Fall 2012.

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In the contemporary United States, civil justice problems are widespread. Just how widespread cannot be known, as the most recent comprehensive national survey of public experience with civil justice problems and institutions is thirty-five years old. In the U.S., these common problems affect as many as 150 million people each year, and have potentially wide-ranging and powerful impacts on core areas of life such as livelihood, shelter, the care and custody of minor children and dependent adults, neighborhood safety, and environmental conditions. Despite the fact that most of these problems never reach the formal justice system, courts are often overwhelmed by the numbers of civil litigants. Local, state, and federal governments, generous individuals, and private foundations contribute more than 1 billion dollars each year to fund civil legal assistance for low- and moderate-income people, but because we lack research on this topic, we know little about how this activity is organized, what services this funding supports, how existing programs do their work, and whether outreach efforts adequately understand and address the most common barriers to access to these services. Little high quality, publicly available data exist to stimulate theory, engage scholarship, and guide policy on issues of access to justice. This project is a workshop convening scholars and practitioners to develop and begin work on a new research agenda for access to civil justice. Invitees include staff from institutions of civil justice, such as judges, leaders from the organized bar, and legal services practitioners as well as scholars from law, statistics and the social and behavioral sciences. The convening seeks to synthesize and coordinate existing research activity and to generate new research activity, including research that can inform policy.