The Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System announced this week that it will release its study on the justice needs of Americans and their access to justice, which will provide some empirical data on the societal, racial and economic factors playing into American justice needs.
“It is widely accepted and acknowledged that there is an access to justice problem in the United States, but what that problem actually looks like is actually still unclear,” the IAALS US Justice Needs page states. In the past the focus of research was set on meeting legal needs of low-income people, or those having trouble accessing an expensive, complicated and “outdated” legal system. “But there is far more going on beneath the surface.”
The Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System working with the Hague Institute for Innovation of Law completed what they claim is the first nationwide survey of its size to measure how Americans over a broad range of socio-demographic groups experience and resolve legal problems. The full report will be released Sept. 1, and IAALS and HiiL will host a free and public webinar the same day, and a second one that will take place on Sept. 15.
The survey, which reached approximately 10,000 people, asked about legal problems Americans experienced in the past four years, what they did to solve them and if they felt they managed to reach a fair resolution.
“The findings of this survey indicate what our research has historically shown—that oftentimes the more developed a nation is, the more justice needs exist in the population and the greater the challenge of access to justice [is] for all,” said Dr. Martin Gramatikov, Measuring Justice Director at HiiL, in a statement. “While it is widely understood that there is an access to justice problem in the United States, the full extent of the justice crisis has been less clear, until now.”
The report examines the rates at which people encounter legal problems, the seriousness of those problems and the rates at which they were able to completely resolve their problems. The report findings show that the most vulnerable people were people of lower income, women, multiracial and Black Americans, younger and middle-aged Americans and those living in urban and rural environments.
According to preliminary results released from IAALS, access to justice is a broad problem with 66% of the U.S. population experiencing at least one legal issue in the past four years, and less than half — 49% — of those problems were completely resolved. In translation, every year 55 million Americans experience roughly 260 million legal problems.
Of that 260 million, around 120 million aren’t solved or concluded in a way that is perceived by survey respondents as fair, according to the released findings.
“There is no income group, gender, race or ethnic group, age group or geographic area that does not face a substantial number of legal problems,” a release about the report states.
While IAALS states that the data collected reveals the extent and how those problems vary across demographic characteristics, it also focuses on two problems: work and unemployment and money-related problems.
In a statement, Logan Cornett, the IAALS director of research, said that money-related work and unemployment problems disproportionately impact vulnerable groups in society, which IAALS anticipates have become even more common and impactful due to COVID.
“The data also highlights the critical issues of inequity in the United States justice system,” Cornett said. “While access to justice is a broad societal problem, the effects of the justice crises are not equally distributed.”
Project objectives for the report were focused on developing a greater understanding of the justice needs of the U.S. and target reform efforts by providing courts, legal services providers and the larger legal community with information about needs and to inform for a more empirically based approach to reform, according to the IAALS website.
Law Week will provide a full report on the study’s findings as information becomes available.