Workshop: Computing, Information Science, and Access to Justice

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Title: Workshop: Computing, Information Science, and Access to the Justice SystemSocial science research demonstrates that low and middle-income people face significant barriers to obtaining access to the civil justice system because of an inability to afford a lawyer. While experiments with new approaches to access to the legal system have garnered much attention from courts, legal aid organizations, and the bar, there is little research about the efficacy of these new approaches. In other fields of human activity, computer scientists are creating new and powerful technologies to study how people interact with private and public institutions, as well as new communication tools, such as apps and social media, to improve these interactions. These computing-based approaches can lead to new knowledge about interactions with the civil justice system and new tools to advance the goal of improving access to the justice system. This workshop will bring together several recent scientific, administrative, and technological trends to develop a new research agenda focused on computing and access to the justice system. These trends include emerging research on the civil justice system, the expanding digitization of information in legal institutions and organizations, and the recent rise of computational social science and the fields of human-centered computing, machine learning, and computing connectivity. The workshop will convene researchers engaged in access to justice scholarship, data scientists, human-centered computing experts, and representatives of courts, legal service providers, and other organizations embedded in the civil justice system, to generate a collaborative research agenda focused on the workings of the legal system. The workshop will produce a framework for research that applies computing methods to the scholarship on access to justice, while generating actionable knowledge about how to improve the civil justice system and strengthen its role in the United States democratic system.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.