Ways Self-Represented Litigants Can Help Improve the Justice System
Justice system reform is slow and difficult work and opportunities for change vary tremendously between jurisdictions. The following offers some ideas for your consideration if you are interested in helping to make courts better in your community.
Year published:
2022
Document Author:
SRLN
Comments: SRLN Comments to Proposed Court Rule Changes in Florida on Technology Integration (SRLN 2021)
On July 1, 2021, the Florida Supreme Court appointed Workgroup on the Continuity of Court Operations and Proceedings During and After COVID-19 filed a petition to amend the Florida Rules of Civil Procedure, Florida Rules of General Practice and Judicial Administration, Florida Rules of Criminal Procedure, Florida Probate Rules, Florida Rules of Traffic Court, Florida Small Claims Rules, and Florida Rules of Appellate Procedure.
Year published:
2021
Document Author:
SRLN
News: Self-Help Innovations in Maryland (News 2021)
The Maryland Court Help Center 2021 Provider Conference offered a glimpse into some of the cutting edge innovations in self-help in the COVID era.1
Year published:
2021
Document Author:
SRLN
Paper: A Case for Court Governance Principles (Becker and Durham 2010)
State courts have had ample reasons for questioning the continued viability of traditional approaches to organizing their work and to providing leadership. This paper proposed a set of principles for governing state court systems that was intended to provoke a debate about how court governance could best be enhanced to meet current and future challenges. The principles outlined in this paper were developed by examining what courts, as institutions, need to do internally to meet their responsibilities.
Year published:
2010
Document Author:
Christine Durham and Daniel Becker
Report: Designing for Housing Stability: Best Practices for Court-Based and Court-Adjacent Eviction Prevention and/or Diversion Programs (Harvard Negotiation & Mediation Clinical Program and American Bar Association 2021)
Designing for Housing Stability: Best Practices for Court-Based and Court-Adjacent Eviction Prevention and/or Diversion Programs (Joint Report of the Harvard Negotiation & Mediation Clinical Program and American Bar Association 2021)
Year published:
2021
Document Author:
Harvard Negotiation & Mediation Clinical Program, American Bar Association
Report: Justice Tech for All How Technology can Ethically Disrupt the US Justice System (Village Capital & AmFam Institute 2021)
Village Capital and American Family Insurance Institute for Corporate and Social Impact (AmFam Institute) prepared this report to support justice tech efforts and initiatives.
Year published:
2021
Document Author:
Village Capital & AmFam Institute
SRLN Brief: Advocacy Strategies & Relationship Building to Improve SRL Services (SRLN 2021)
The Justice for All Initiative envisions a future in which civil justice is administered through a continuum of services, from self-help materials to alternative dispute resolution to limited-scope or full legal representation. In this continuum, individual litigants receive precisely the help they need—no more and no less, and lawyers work “at the top of their licenses,” able to trim overhead to increase profit.
Year published:
2021
Document Author:
SRLN
Journal: Special edition of Daedalus: Access to Justice (American Academy of Arts & Sciences 2019)
The Winter 2019 issue of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences' quarterly journal, Daedalus, “Access to Justice” features twenty-four essays that examine the national crisis in civil legal services facing poor and low-income Americans: from the challenges of providing quality legal assistance to more people, to the social and economic costs of an often unresponsive legal system, to the opportunities for improvement offered by new technologies, professional innovations, and fresh ways of thinking about the crisis.
Year published:
2019
Document Author:
American Academy of Arts & Sciences
Video: The Civil Justice Gap (American Academy of Arts & Sciences 2020)
The Academy produced this short video, defining the civil justice gap, to support the work of the Making Justice Accessible initiative and the release of its final report, Civil Justice for All. Run time: 4 minutes 45 seconds.
Recommended citation: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, The Civil Justice Gap (Cambridge, Mass.: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2020) https://www.amacad.org/civil-justice-gap-video
Year published:
2020
Document Author:
American Academy of Arts & Sciences
Report: Measuring Civil Justice for All (American Academy of Arts & Sciences 2021)
Measuring Civil Justice for All, a white paper of the American Academy’s Making Justice Accessible initiative, identifies the essential facts that should be collected about civil justice activity in the United States and the entities best placed to collect that information. It also describes a range of data access standards that would help to guide the use of civil justice data for administrative and research purposes.
Year published:
2021
Document Author:
American Academy of Arts & Sciences