New Report: Stephanie Beaugh, Amanda Brown, Amy Duncan, Rachael Mills, and Monte Mollere, Legal Access Points in Louisiana: a Case Study, Lagniappe Law Lab (2020).
In late 2019, the Louisiana Access to Justice Commission was awarded one of what would be two “Justice for All” grants from the National Center for State Courts. In the first phase, the Louisiana Civil Justice System and the project team was tasked with inventorying resources and assessing its effectiveness against the JFA initiatives 15 components.
Of course, in March 2020 the world turned upside down.
What initially set out to be a series of community listening sessions quickly turned into a pivot. Instead, the JFA project team used this opportunity (and funding) to take a more quantitative approach to understanding the legal service delivery needs of Louisianans across the state.
A geodata hackathon hosted by Lagniappe Law Lab, with Geospatial Information Systems (GIS) expertise from the Self Represented Litigation Network (SRLN), and support from the ATJ Internship program interns, resulted in comprehensive data set of civil legal resources like legal aid, self help desks, law libraries, and courts. We also gathered data from legal aid on their case volume across the state.
We also identified that many people lived more than 45 minutes away from their closest in-person civil legal resource. Comparing this to other publicly available data on poverty and broadband gave us a sobering realization: more than 600,000 income eligible Louisianans (34%) live in places where meaningful legal assistance is simply out of reach.
Poverty Law 