Community-Based Legal Solutions for Everyday Problems, with Rebecca Sandefur & Matthew Burnett

Episode Notes

Transcript

Stephanie Everett:

Hi, I’m Stephanie.

Zack Glaser :

And I’m Zack. And this is episode 5 74 of the Lawyerist Podcast, part of the Legal Talk Network. Today, I talk with law professors and access to justice researchers, Rebecca Sandefur and Matthew Burnett about community justice worker programs and how taking a people-centered approach might help us expand access to justice.

Stephanie Everett:

I love that. Well, Zack fall is, believe it or not, I feel like it’s upon us. I mean, the temperatures outside. Do not say that. At least not in Atlanta does not feel like fall,

Zack Glaser :

Not Memphis,

Stephanie Everett:

But depending on where you live, we’re already back to school and I’m looking at my fall calendar and it’s crazy busy, and so it feels like Fall is here,

Zack Glaser :

Fall is here, and that is the season where we go to a lot of conferences, a lot of legal conferences, and especially for us, Clio Con is coming up.

Stephanie Everett:

Yes, and I’m excited. It’s a new location this year, actually. We’re headed up to Boston in October. October 16th and 17th this year, and I’m pretty sure that’s going to be the perfect time to visit Boston. I mean,

Zack Glaser :

I hope so. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I’ve never been to Boston. It’ll be, wait, no, I did. I went to Boston for HubSpot. Yeah.

Stephanie Everett:

Okay. Well, you been to Boston?

Zack Glaser :

It’s only conferences.

Stephanie Everett:

Yes.

Zack Glaser :

Yeah. I’ve never been to a baseball game or anything.

Stephanie Everett:

Well, but funny you mentioned that because I was looking at the schedule yesterday, and it looks like the Cleo’s kind of famous for its evening events as well as the conference. They throw a good party. Let’s not beat around the bush. It looks like the Thursday night event this year is at Fenway.

Zack Glaser :

Oh, I mean, that might be worth going just for that. I know. That’s pretty cool, man. Clio does it. They do well, so they’ve got some speakers, they’re going to announce a couple more, but right now they’ve got Esther Peril. I don’t even know if that’s how you pronounce her last name, but she is a world renowned podcaster in New York Times bestselling author and an expert on modern relationships and workplace dynamics. I like that. Clio always brings something that’s not directly at what you do in your office, but it’s

Stephanie Everett:

Adjacent.

Zack Glaser :

It expands our brains a little bit. It’s related, but it’s not Right on.

Stephanie Everett:

Yeah, no, they always have really great keynote speakers and just lots of speakers from the industry. People always ask us, I mean, if you’re a Clio user, it’s a no-brainer. You should go or send someone from your team to go. They have the folks there on site that can help you understand your Clio better, how to maximize it. There’s tons of sessions on how to get the most out of Clio, but even if you’re not a Clio user, which is what I was going to say, the question we always get, I don’t use Clio, should I still go? And our response has been like, yes, because it’s actually a very well done legal conference where they’re talking about your practice, your business, and it is not just tool specific. There’s lots of tracks where you can just go and get insight. And our favorite thing is also just hanging out with the community. You and I are going to be there, and it’s a fun time to meet new people, connect with lawyers, have fun conversations that you just don’t get to have when you’re, I mean, maybe I feel like they’re probably even different than what the kind of conversations you have at your local bar.

Zack Glaser :

Yeah, I think so. You get some really broad perspectives, and quite frankly, even though it’s just, it’s Clio, it’s one law practice management system that you’re using. There’s a lot of apps that integrate with it, so you wind up seeing a lot of the partners that are there, but people use Clio in very different ways from each other as well. And so you can get ideas. Again, even if you’re not using Clio, you can get ideas on how you can use your own law practice management software or just talk to people about your pain, the pains of managing all this stuff.

Stephanie Everett:

And we’re going to be there, and we would love to see people. I love meeting people in real life. We always have a lot of fun. So if you needed, I mean, I don’t know, is there any other great reason other than that? Just come hang out with me and s Zack?

Zack Glaser :

Yeah, yeah, just see us IRL as the kids maybe used to say. They might not even be saying that anymore.

Stephanie Everett:

Yeah, I feel like we probably shouldn’t say that. It probably means we’re out of touch.

Zack Glaser :

Oh, man. I used to feel like I was one of the young people in law, but that was 11 years ago.

Stephanie Everett:

That day has passed. But we’ll put, I think even maybe we even have a discount, or hopefully now that I’ve said that out loud, Clio might hook us up with a little coupon code or discount code. So check out the show notes and we’ll make sure we put a link in there to the conference. And as we get closer to the event, we’ll also be letting people know where they can find us and what kind of cool stuff we’re going to be doing in Boston.

Zack Glaser :

Looking forward to it, and we’d love to see everybody there.

Stephanie Everett:

And now let’s check out Zack’s conversation with Becky and Matthew.

Rebecca Sandefur:

Hi, I’m Rebecca Sandifer. I’m on the faculty of Arizona State University, and I’m a faculty fellow at the American Bar Foundation and with Matthew Burnett who’s going to introduce himself in just a minute. I’m a co-founder of an organization called Frontline Justice.

Matthew Burnett:

Hi, I am Matthew Burnett, and I’m the director of research and programs for the Access to Justice Research Initiative at the American Bar Foundation, and I also teach a class on X justice at Georgetown Law School.

Zack Glaser :

Well, Becky, Matthew, thank you for being with me. I appreciate y’all’s time and coming and helping us with some access to justice issues here. I really appreciate y’all being here. Thank you.

Rebecca Sandefur:

Thank you. We’re happy to be here.

Zack Glaser :

It is easy to think of access to justice, and I think we were talking about this a little bit before we got started. It’s easy to think of access to justices, let’s throw some money at it, and let’s get more attorneys for free or increase pro bono hours that people have to do and let’s throw more lawyers at it. That has never really been the argument that certainly Becky has made, but that’s also not the argument that you guys are making. Y’all have a paper that y’all put out last year. I believe it’s a people centered approach to designing and evaluating community justice worker programs in the United States. That’s a long one. Let’s talk about the approach that y’all are taking in there to bridge the access to justice gap. There is a gap.

Rebecca Sandefur:

There’s definitely a gap, and that’s maybe a long title for that paper, but it puts a lot of ideas in there that we feel like are important, and one of them is that we should approach justice and giving people access to justice from their perspective. So from a people-centered perspective, because we know some things about people and the way they experience justice issues that are useful in designing solutions that can connect with them.

Zack Glaser :

I think that’s a good point right there, and I think that’s a good entry into this whole thing is when we talk about a people-centered approach, what is the access to justice issue from the user perspective, I guess is really what we’re talking about.

Matthew Burnett:

I think that’s a big part of it. I think also traditionally, we like to think about access to justice from the perspective of lawyers and courts. So one of the things that we’ve learned through Becky’s research for the last decade, more than a decade, is that most civil justice problems don’t ever see formal law. They don’t see courts or lawyers. And so I think that from one part of that is around under understanding people’s experience of law and designing solutions that are actually meeting people where they are.

Zack Glaser :

I don’t want to spend too much time talking about the framing of the access to justice problem. Certainly, as Becky talks about it previously, because we have an episode on this episode 2 28 of the Lawyers podcast. It’s June, 2019. That is how long, at least how long we’ve been framing this idea of access to justice of people not even having any idea that they have a justice issue. We think of access to justice. I as an attorney, think of access to justice as, oh, people can’t afford an attorney, but that’s not really what we’re talking about. Right?

Rebecca Sandefur:

No, it’s really striking. If you ask people who have significant justice issues, so they’re buying on their rent, they’re not getting paid for their job, they are fighting with their insurance company, they often, they either understand those things as problems. This is just something that happens, it’s part of life, or they understand them as challenges in relationships. So my employer is a jerk. My landlord is a wife buying, right? But they’re very unlikely to see the legal aspects of those problems. And so that means they’re less likely to think about law or justice or lawyers or justice workers or anybody who could assist them with the law part as a place to go when they need that kind of assistance. So lawyers can be tremendously expensive, and there probably aren’t enough of them working on people law as Bill Henderson calls it, but that’s not the first barrier. The first barrier is people just really aren’t thinking about lawyers and courts and things like that at all when they confront these kinds of issues.

Zack Glaser :

Yeah, I think obviously that’s the thing that’s interesting to me about this research is that from that people-centered perspective, having more attorneys doesn’t matter to them at all. Having an attorney at a courthouse, we free attorneys at the courthouse, you’ve got an issue with your landlord. There’s free attorneys at the courthouse. I’m not going to the courthouse. I don’t think it’s an issue that can be solved by the courts. And so that’s one of the things that we’re kind of talking about here in the idea of, I guess, bridging the gap app between what happens in court and what are just people’s issues, their problems in life, right?

Rebecca Sandefur:

Yeah,

Zack Glaser :

Absolutely. So y’all have put forward some concepts here, and I guess it’s not necessarily put forward some concepts. Y y’all are talking about some concepts that have been put forward previously of having, I guess, what is it? We call it a community justice worker. Talk to me about the community justice worker, somebody, because that comes from that idea of what is it that people need as opposed to what we think they need. So I think there are

Matthew Burnett:

Two dimensions of that. One is that there might be roles beyond lawyers that would help us to scale access the justice. And so one way to think about that is there aren’t enough lawyers and we need more people helping people, but I think another really powerful way to think about it is lawyers might not be in the best position to be helping people in every instance. And so one of the things that we’re learning through the research in Alaska is that justice workers actually represent the communities that they’re serving. So of the entire population of Alaska, about 20% are Alaska native, so indigenous to Alaska, but about 30 a third are represented as Alaska native as community justice workers. And so the community justice worker pool of folks who are helping folks in their communities are over representing the actual population of the state. I think that’s exciting because we talk about the four Ts, so as the justice solutions should be timely and targeted and trusted and transparent, and it brings all of those four Ts into play in terms of how we think about community justice workers and their orientation to the community, but also the orientation to the problem that folks experience.

And Becky, I’m sure you have something to add.

Rebecca Sandefur:

No, I was just going to talk about the four T’s, which you did, which is great.

Zack Glaser :

Well, let’s take a half step back and talk about you’re discussing the community justice workers in Alaska. Frame that for me a little bit because in the paper that’s one that’s kind of the opening topic here. What do we mean when we’re talking about the community justice workers in Alaska and what’s the example there?

Rebecca Sandefur:

So I would take even a quarter step back from your half step back and think about what we know about people and the way they think about and experience their justice issues and why community justice workers would be one solution to what we understand. So we know people aren’t thinking about these issues as legal. We know that they’re going to all kinds of places for help with them that don’t have legal over the top, so they’re going to their church or they’re going to their doctor, or they’re going to a community health clinic or something like that. So then we should be putting people who can help them in the places where they already go. So that’s one thing that underlies the idea of community justice workers. Another thing is in order to connect with people and give them meaningful assistance, you need to understand not just their problem in a clinical sense, but also their life.

And it’s easier to understand someone’s life if you share it. So if you speak their language or you live in their community or you’re from their group, you already have really important knowledge that somebody else coming in from the outside would have to learn over a long period of time. So rather than parachuting people in, you start with people who are already working with people where they already are and already understand them. So community justice workers are people who have training and authorization to provide limited legal services. So it might be around one issue, it might be around three issues. It’s not about full service across the full range of that issue. It’s about assisting people with critical moments like appealing the denial of a snap benefit so that they can have food security and feed their families. So these are folks who are doing targeted things that are intervening in critical moments that’re usually community members.

They could be volunteers in the sense that you or I could go in and volunteer. They could be volunteers in the sense that they’re doing, this is an upskilling of their current work, so they could add this to their community health aid work or their social worker work or their librarian work. And then some of them do it as that’s their job. They’re on the staff of Alaska Legal Services and they do community justice work in different parts of the state full time. Alaska was the first to deploy this program, but now you see it in Arizona and Utah. There are I think seven or eight other states that have authorized or in the process of authorizing justice worker models of different kinds.

Zack Glaser :

Yeah, that’s community justice workers. This is not, I hate using the word, but this is not a lawyer who is doing something that is theoretically would require a law degree to do giving legal advice, but people already do that. I think that’s the thing In reading this, and you guys put some examples here, there are multiple examples of people already providing legal advice without being lawyers in the community because that’s just what’s needed, right?

Matthew Burnett:

Yeah. I think there are two ways in which people already do it. One is in a way that’s authorized. So community justice workers aren’t new for the last 50 years in the US, folks like accredited immigration representatives, representatives in federal and state administrative proceedings, tribal lay advocates, there’s jailhouse lawyers are all authorized to provide legal advice. In some cases, representation. There’s another way which I think you’re getting at, which is just people are just helping their neighbors and giving them legal advice. The challenge with that perspective is that in most states it’s criminalized. And so it’s not just the regulatory sort of authority of theBar, but it’s statutory authority that criminalizes providing legal advice and representation. And of course that chills this kind of activity from happen. And if you talk to folks like librarians or faith leaders or others, that is driven into them and it’s clear that that’s actually preventing them from helping their neighbors or members of their communities. And so a big part of this movement in the work of frontline justice is to create spaces in which this work not only can happen, but is empowered and resourced and supported in new ways that make it scalable and sustainable over time.

Zack Glaser :

That made my brain go a bunch of different ways, as a lot of things do. And I think, I don’t know if I really even want to ask this question, but it’s picking at me here. Why can’t people give legal advice to their friends and neighbors? And I mean, what’s the reason? Why are we regulating this? I get not being able to go into court and argue, I get that because we have to play by certain rules. We have these sorts of ideas of evidence and decorum and whatnot, but giving advice on how to appeal snap benefits to my neighbor, and I’m not an attorney, why in the hell is that criminalized problem? I

Matthew Burnett:

Think there’s two ways the will add to this. One way to think about that is a constitutional issue. And of course, Salvie James in New York has surfaced just that constitutional question, which is a First amendment challenge to New York’s UPL statute on First Amendment speech and association crown. So that’s actually an open question. They prevailed at the circuit court. It’s on appeal now. So there’s an open question as to whether that kind of legal advice is protected by the first amend. Beyond that, I think that there is more practical kinds of questions about what would we want to have in place in order to ensure that that advice is quality, that it’s not harming folks. And so I think that there’s kind of a constitutional question, and then there’s kind of an applied question, a practical question about what would we want that to look like in instances where it’s authorized?

Rebecca Sandefur:

What I would add is that we give lawyers a kind of monopoly over the definition of the practice of law that we don’t give to other professions. So think about medicine.

So we give each other medical advice all the time, and there are patient forums and forums around different conditions you can go on and they say, if your doctor tells you to do this, don’t do it. And if we did that in a legal context, it would be criminalized in most states. I mean people understanding their own issues and organizing to advocate around them. It seems strange. I agree with you, Zack, that we would say in this particular context, folks can’t do it, but it’s fine if it’s just your health and your life, but it’s not fine if it’s the law.

Zack Glaser :

Yeah. So I generally go to this idea that we, we don’t want people hurting other people by giving them bad advice. We don’t want people to honestly screw up our justice system and the whole of justice and whatnot. But if we’re not helping people, if we’re fundamentally not getting to people, then what does it even matter, I guess? And you guys have kind of created a different way of measuring what success looks like in this community justice workers model in this way of, and I think it flips the idea of what we’re trying to do with the practice of law a little bit kind of on its head. Can you talk to me a little bit about that?

Rebecca Sandefur:

Well, I think, so part of what I heard in the way you framed your question was I think what is a common myth when solutions that are not traditionally licensed attorneys are brought forward, which is this is going to eat lawyers lunch. And to your point, no one is helping these people. Now these are people who cannot afford $500 an hour, who are receiving no assistance for life altering issues. This is not going to cut into some market that is controlled by any particular occupation at this point. That’s something to think about when we think about success, and this speaks to this enormous number of people who have problems that they’re not getting assistance for. Yes, you want that assistance to be effective. You want it to be competent, you want it to be safe. You want it to solve the problem that it’s targeting to solve. But if it can’t scale up to assist the, I don’t know, 120 million people, I think I LS estimates or 120 million new justice problems every year that don’t get resolved, that don’t get any service, that’s not 200 more attorneys, that’s a lot of assistance that you need. So success is also about designing solutions that can scale.

It’s also about designing solutions that are sustainable, so sustainable in the sense that they don’t rely on a single funding source that might go away. They don’t rely on the whims of the federal government to be interested in supporting some things at sometimes and to take that support away at another time, but they’re also sustainable for the people who are in them because you can be dealing with people who are facing really challenging issues, and that can be challenging for you. So what are the ways that we can design supports so that people who want to do this work can persistent and be healthy in the same way that we think about that for attorneys around things like depression and substance use and all that kind of stuff.

Zack Glaser :

What I hear in that with the scalability and sustainability is kind of goes back to this fundamental question, and I want to preface this with, one could argue against some of the assumptions that that would be made in here of if we allow non-licensed persons, if we allow non-law licensed persons to perform some legal functions to practice law in a way, then we might be introducing more error into the system. And we don’t want that because we want less error. But by not allowing for that, by not allowing for that scalability, then we’re just not doing anything. I’d rather, I’d rather have something work for 95 people and yeah, maybe it doesn’t work as well for five, then something just not even work for anybody. Does that make any sense as to what I’m talking about there?

Matthew Burnett:

Yeah, but I think there’s two ways. So there, one way that that’s used is as an argument for why just nothing, no opening for non-lawyers providing legal advice and representation should happen. The good news is that all of the evidence that we have, both the emerging evidence in the US and in the UK and England and Wales, suggest not only that non-lawyers perform at the same level as lawyers, but in some cases they’re more effective than lawyers. In the study that Becky did in New York courts with the kind of high touch court navigators, there were zero evictions in the Alaska model. Thus far, there’s been a hundred percent success rate. So there’s just no evidence to suggest that that’s even right, which is the starting point, I think, to then have a conversation about, well, what if we wanted to build systems to ensure that we continue to provide quality in a way that’s scalable and sustainable?

I think that’s the exciting moment we’re at. So I said at a conference recently, I’m kind of tired of making the case for the existence of justice workers. I’m really excited about the idea that we can now build robust, sustainable, scalable programs like the Alaska model, which has over 200 trained community justice workers having impact in over 40 cities, villages and towns across the Alaska, which is an enormous state. It’s larger than the next three states combined. So those kinds of insights and the kind of research and work that can happen around that I think is really exciting. And I think hopefully it’s where we’re going. I don’t think we need more pilots. I think we need support for the reforms that can make this happen, and then to empower legal aid and other community-based organizations to make it happen in a way that’s fully engaged and not just trying things here and there.

Zack Glaser :

So what does that look like? What do those programs look like? What do the community justice worker programs look like as we roll them out into various other states?

Matthew Burnett:

I think they look like a lot of different things at this moment. So Alaska is a broad waiver that applies across the board only to Alaska legal services in terms of the supervision requirement at this point. But the idea is that would expand to other legal aid and community-based organizations In other states like Arizona, there’s authorization and those folks are kind of figuring out how to build these programs. And part of frontline justice work is actually getting all these folks to work together and build infrastructure to support that work. In Texas, there’s a proposed rule as well as some fairly significant funding that’s going into developing community justice worker programs that rule needs to get implemented. And then there are other places like in Delaware for example, where it’s limited just to folks who are representing folks in housing court, so the tenant advocates. And I think that that was really about making the case for landlords and tenants.

So landlords prior to this authorization could have property managers and other non-lawyers representing them, whereas tenants couldn’t. So that’s much more about parity and making that case. In South Carolina, there are housing advocates who are approved by the Supreme Court largely because of litigation that the NAACP brought federally to force the hand of the Supreme Court. And so there’s a lot of different examples. Obviously I talked about absolved in New York where this is growing in different ways and broader ways and more siloed ways. We’re most excited obviously, about the broad approvals that are happening in places like Alaska and Arizona and Texas, largely because that allows for experimentation. And we don’t know everything right now, which is why we bullish about building research and evidence into the DNA of these projects. Because the more I think the broader the authorization, the more likely it is that we’re going to have ways to get it right instead of being narrow and siloed about how we think about specific legal issues or areas or specific kinds of people or just their kinds of training. And these things will take time to evolve.

Rebecca Sandefur:

I don’t know how much your listeners follow things like sandboxes and entity regulation and alternative business structures and regulatory reform, but most of these things are authorized for some kind of entity authorization. So Alaska Legal Services is authorized to recruit and train and supervise justice workers in Arizona. The LSC funded legal aid organizations are authorized to do that, and also community organizations are authorized to do that. And so states are at least in these early models, giving those authorized entities a lot of space to think about how are we going to train people and how are we going to supervise people, as Matthew said, that lets us have enough variability happening in the world to get a sense of what is more and less effective at achieving effective services.

Zack Glaser :

So where do they need to go with this? I guess what’s the kind of the next steps? Because I think of these sandboxes, and I think that our listeners, at least we’ve put out some episodes on the sandboxes in Arizona and some various other places. So if they don’t know about those, they can either Google it or listen to some of our previous episodes. But my question there is when do we get out of the sandbox? When do we start? What’s that next step coming out of that? And I think that goes to the sustainability question because if we’re pumping money into legal services and legal aid and things like that and saying, Hey, we’ll go hire some people to do these things, great. And I think that’s something we need to do, but taking that next step and making it something that’s kind of sustainable and is able to live on its own, how do we do that?

Rebecca Sandefur:

I think we opened the box, which is what is happening. So in Alaska, there’s one statewide legal aid provider and yet is allowed to develop trainings and authorize people and supervise people in a wide range of justice issues. And so we need those kinds of statewide authorizations that allow people who are close to problems and communities to act on those things with the expertise they have from that experience rather than little tiny experiments pilots, super tightly controlled top down models of how to do this stuff.

Zack Glaser :

But we still need, I guess that’s where I get on some of this, but we still need to regulate it. We still need licensing of people. I mean, I guess that’s the thing that gets me is we’re going from licensing some people to licensing other people. We’re

Rebecca Sandefur:

Going to authorizing people. They don’t right now, I don’t know of justice workers that are licensed yet. And I think we might ask ourselves, what do we want licensing to do for anybody? Whether it’s somebody who cuts your hair or replaces your windows or something like that.

Well, maybe part of what we want is some kind of assurance of competency, which we could get in other ways. And maybe what we want is some kind of way to backstop errors and mistakes, which we can get through things like consumer protection law. I mean, there are all kinds of services and things that you and I and all of us buy and use that are not licensed and don’t have that particular way of protecting us from booboos. And so we might think about this toolkit of ways to solve that problem and licensing is one of them, but maybe it’s not the way. Maybe it has some problems. It prevents scale, it makes it more costly. It imposes sort of oor top-down, not usually very evidence-based criteria for doing something should you have to have a criminal background check to cut my hair. What is that about? So this is an opportunity to think about, to go back to your original question, Zack, what do people want and what do they need and how do they engage with their justice issues? And since this isn’t just a replication of an old model, but a completely new kind of open space if we want to do it right or well, how would we do it from those first principles and from the evidence that we have? And licensing might be a rule sometimes, but hopefully not all the time.

Matthew Burnett:

And I think there is a state, so Arizona has two prongs to its community justice worker. Rule one is a much more accessible and less onerous path to providing legal advice. And another is a much more onerous and more from the perspective of someone who wants be a community justice worker rigorous path, which allows them to provide in court representation of things like domestic violence and housing issues. So I think it’ll be interesting to see there. What we’ve contended based on the evidence is that programs like the triple LT program in Washington and other licensed professional programs are harder to grow. And so it’s probably the case that some hybrid approach that allows both these easier to access and less onerous paths as well as more of a sort of licensure path that allows people to do more will address different kinds of things. But I think that ultimately, if we want scale, if we want the 200 plus community justice workers that we have in Alaska, we’re going to have to make those trainings low barrier.

We’re going to have to make them focused on specific kinds of issues and interventions. We’re going to need to open it up to more kinds of people. Becky suggested, why do we need criminal background checks when we are asking people from communities that are overpoliced and enforced to be community justice workers? I think those are all open questions. And again, the exciting thing is that there’s now some variation in how different states are doing this. I think as they are implemented and roll out, we’ll learn more about what really matters. California right now has a really interesting proposal that’s more like a sandbox, and they care more about the evidence that’s generated, that shows that there is or isn’t harm than a specific set of rules that are telling us how community justice workers have to look and what they can do. And I think that’s really exciting as well.

Zack Glaser :

So as we get towards the end of our time here, what does success look like here with community justice workers, with this bridging this gap? What does success look like for you?

Rebecca Sandefur:

I would like every state in the country to have some mechanism for authorizing community organizations and legal services providers to launch these kinds of programs, to give people the legal assistance that they need around critical life issues where people are already going, where they already are in the language that they already speak. That would be success for me. So it would be effectiveness, scale, and sustainability all at once all over the country. How about you, Matthew?

Matthew Burnett:

I like it. Well, I would like all of those things. I’d also like us to recognize, this is another paper that Becky and I just published in South Carolina Law Review, that this matters for democracy, giving people access to their own law, the kind of opportunities for civic participation, opportunities for people to use and shape law. That’s all about building democracy in a country at a time that I think it’s under threat, frankly. And so I’m excited about the idea both that this movement is bipartisan. Frontline Justice’s National Leadership Council has got folks across the political spectrum, left, right, and center. But also that we begin to acknowledge that democracy is at stake, that in some ways we’re in this place that we’re in because we’ve excluded or estranged people from their own law. And ultimately, at the end of the day, it is the law or it’s people that the law belongs to, not lawyers in courts. And I think that recognition as part of this work is really critical to thinking about how to think about success.

Zack Glaser :

Man, you really hit us with our democracy. Depends on it argument here. But I think you’re right. I think that makes sense is that all of this, and this is kind of fundamental to which y’all are talking about here, is that our legal system is really only as good as people trust it and think it works. So we need to build one that works for them. Any other thoughts, ideas, things that you want to share around these initiatives before we go?

Rebecca Sandefur:

I mean, lawyers went into law. I mean, I guess some of them went into law for non prosocial reasons, but I think a lot of people go into law because they want to make the world a better place and help people with their problems or work on big systemic issues, whether it’s the environment or any of these other things. And so it’s easy to be afraid of things that are new, particularly when they come into our space.

An example would be AI and people who write papers for a living. I mean, many of my colleagues are flipping out because now a computer can do part of what they’ve done. And so it’s easy to be threatened by those things, but justice workers are absolutely allied with the same motivations that bring so many lawyers into law, and they’re a way of increasing the size and scope of our toolkit for doing what lawyers came into this business to do. So I think it’s important to see the alignment and the connection and the solidarity across these different roles, even though there will be some friction as they develop.

Matthew Burnett:

And it also can be a pathway to law, one of the fantastic community justice workers in Alaska starting law school next fall or this fall. And I think she’s going to be an incredible lawyer, and I think she’s also going to approach the law in a way that’s fundamentally different than many of her classmates, largely because she’s had this experience. And I think that is a very positive thing, even for our existing system of law school and law as a pathway.

Zack Glaser :

I like it. I like we’re on the same team, we’re all on the same team here. We’re not trying to hurt the public. And so community justice workers are on the same team trying to do the same stuff, trying to get the same stuff done. Well, Becky, Matthew, I really appreciate y’all bearing with me and helping me understand some of these things today. Yeah, thank you for being with me. Thank you for having us.

Rebecca Sandefur:

Thank you so much for this opportunity to talk about this. Yeah, thank you.

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