LegalAidResearch.org – Research & Evidence for Civil Legal Aid

Medical-Legal Partnership and Healthy Start: Integrating Civil Legal Aid Services into Public Health Advocacy

Daniel Atkins et al.
Journal of Legal Medicine
March 26, 2014
This article looks at the medical-legal partnership model and how it can improve health outcomes by addressing the underlying social determinants of health.

Optimizing the Health Impacts of Civil Legal Aid Interventions: The Public Health Framework of Medical-Legal Partnerships

Ellen Lawton, Elizabeth Tobin Tyler
Rhode Island Medical Journal
July 1, 2013
This article shows how medical-legal partnerships, a healthcare delivery model, can address the social determinants of health -- how one's social conditions (like neighborhood, job, and access to resources) affect health.

“In the long run, legal aid programs’ investment in randomized study will not only improve services and help direct scarce resources, but will also build public support.

The willingness of the legal aid movement to question itself and change in response will demonstrate to the wider world that our work is, in the end, focused on doing the best we can to help very poor people, in often-desperate circumstances, to improve their lives.”

--Steven Eppler-Epstein, Executive Director of Connecticut Legal Services
Harvard Law Review, 2013

"The research imperative of refining ways to measure justice is important and necessary. Our work as lawyers improves the more we know about our effectiveness and the more our choices are evidence based. Nevertheless, quantifying the work of a lawyer is not easy.

"How do we ensure that any measure of justice captures outcomes for both trial-based advocacy and non-trial-based advocacy on behalf of clients, including negotiated outcomes?
"How do we quantify the role lawyers play in listening to our clients, explaining the systems in which they operate, and supporting them through often very difficult times in their lives?
"How do we ensure that any measure of justice includes a client’s sense of the process as well as the outcome?
"How do we make sure that what we measure does not suggest the limits of what is possible or desired?"

--Jane H. Aiken & Stephen Wizner