Author Archives
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Final Report on the Assessment of Telephone-Based Legal Assistance Provided by Pennsylvania Legal Aid Programs Funded Under the Access to Justice Act
This report presents the principal findings and conclusions from a comprehensive evaluation of telephone-based legal assistance being provided by Pennsylvania legal aid programs.
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State Legal Needs Studies Point to Justice Gap
The nine state legal needs studies released 2000-2005 indicate that the findings of the 1993 ABA study concerning the gap between the legal needs experienced by low-income people and the services they receive from private attorneys and legal aid programs remain valid today.
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Passion, Caution, and Evolution: The Legal Aid Movement and Empirical Studies of Legal Assistance
This article responds to D. James Greiner, Cassandra Wolos Pattanayak, and Jonathan Hennessy, The Limits of Unbundled Legal Assistance: A Randomized Study in a Massachusetts District Court and Prospects for the Future, 126 Harv. L. Rev. 901 (2013).
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Documenting the Justice Gap In America: The Current Unmet Civil Legal Needs of Low-Income Americans (2009)
This report updates and expands LSC’s 2005 report “Documenting the Justice Gap in America: The Current Unmet Civil Legal Needs of Low-Income Americans”. This report, completed in September 2009, shows that a continuing, major justice gap exists in our nation: for every person helped by LSC-funded legal aid programs, another is turned away. This report adds data on self-represented litigants.
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Accessing Justice in Contemporary America: The Community Needs and Services Survey
This is the first study to pair an investigation of the civil justice problems people experience with an investigation of the legal and non-legal resources available to assist them in handling those problems.
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Representing Indigent Parties in Civil Cases: An Analysis of State Practices
This is a two-year study of state efforts to provide indigent representation services in civil cases finds that a lack of clear federal guidelines has resulted in variations in state provisions.
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A Test of Unbundled Legal Services in the New York City Housing Court
The study finds that the Volunteer Lawyer for the Day Program is a feasible and useful approach to alleviate the overwhelming unmet legal needs of New York City Housing Court litigants.
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A Report on Pennsylvania’s Access to Justice Act FY 2004-2011
Enacted in 2002, Pennsylvania’s Access to Justice Act is funded by surcharges on legal document filing fees. During FY2004-FY2011, it helped fund work on 117,632 cases and directly benefited 231,735 people.
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Statewide Action Plan for Serving Self-Represented Litigants
The plan states that court-based staffed self-help centers, supervised by attorneys, are the optimum way for courts to facilitate the timely and cost-effective processing of cases involving self-represented litigants, to increase access to the courts and improve delivery of justice to the public. Well-designed strategies to serve self-represented litigants, and to effectively manage their cases at all stages, must be incorporated and budgeted as core court functions.
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A More Detailed Look at Legal Services by Older Americans Act Funded Providers
Among states with sufficient data to form a full sample, this study reports the distribution percentages representing the needs of the people using the legal assistance offered under the Older Americans Act.
Legal Aid Research 