Understanding Access to Justice: Social Sources of Variation in Everyday Relationships to Law

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Civil justice problems are widespread in the United States. For decades, scholars assumed the access to justice crisis was created by a shortage of lawyers or lawyers' unaffordability, but more recent research shows that the main reason people seek no assistance is that they do not think of their problems as “legal.” The failure to seek solutions to civil justice problems has long-term consequences, including income loss, stress, damage to relationships, and tolls on mental and physical well-being. While we know quite a bit about which Americans experience which civil justice problems, we know less about why this is so, and do not yet understand the social processes that underlie various groups’ approaches to these problems. Investigating civil justice problems from the perspective of people who are experiencing them will allow us to design more effective solutions to common justice problems—solutions tailored to how different groups actually think about law. This project will shed new light on the United States access to justice crisis by uniting theoretical questions at the core of socio-legal studies and applied questions at the core of access to justice research. Two data collection components will be used to understand how people approach seven common justice problems. The first phase will use a survey design to understand the connections between demographic characteristics such as race, class, and gender and the problem-solving routes people consider. The second phase will use a series of in-depth interviews with a broad cross-section of people over time in a medium-sized U.S. city who are currently experiencing, or have recently experienced, one of these key justice problems. This multi-method approach will provide a rigorous understanding of the social sources of variation in how people think about law, the ways people approach and experience civil justice problems, and how different justice problems are related to one another in everyday people’s experience.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.