New Article: Anthony Victor Alfieri, Jeanne Charn, Jeffrey Selbin & Stephen Wizner, Service Delivery, Resource Allocation and Access to Justice: Greiner and Pattanayak and the Research Imperative, SSRN. Abstract below:
This essay is a reflection on Jim Greiner and Cassandra Pattanayak’s provocative article reporting the results of a randomized controlled trial evaluating legal assistance to low-income clients at the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau. We briefly describe the study and the initial skeptical reaction from many of our colleagues. We then offer an alternative reading of the findings to explore additional meaning and opportunity embedded in the study. Building on this alternative reading, we suggest what research like Greiner and Pattanayak’s can tell us about individual representation, program design and systemic access to justice questions. We argue that developments in law schools, the professions and a growing demand for evidence-driven policymaking provide support, infrastructure and incentive for such research. We conclude with a call for legal services lawyers and clinical law professors to collaborate in an expansive, empirical research agenda.
The Greiner and Pattanayak study coincides with a moment of crisis in American law and society exhibited in rising rates of poverty and inequality. This widening crisis is exacerbated by deteriorating conditions in public access to courts and legal representation. High-quality research offers a valuable opportunity to understand and to improve local and institutional responses to this growing crisis. Greiner and Pattanayak should prompt us to reflect on our representational models, distributive decisions and systemic access efforts. In fact, in these lean times, evidence of efficacy may be our best hope of attracting more human and financial capital to our vital work. Legal services lawyers and clinical law teachers should meet this challenge with the same passion, ingenuity and integrity that we have devoted to the cause of justice since the inception of our modern movements more than four decades ago.
Poverty Law 