Demand-Side�Justice
Alissa Rubin Gomez
University of Houston Law Center
March 10, 2021
“A helpful analogy likens surgery to litigation—both call for the intensive, yet inefficient, allocation of resources focused on a single individual. Both surgery and litigation always will be necessary in some cases, but prevention can ensure that reliance on surgery or litigation is lessened by reallocating resources toward prevention activities.”��--Ellen M. Lawton & Megan Sandel, Investing in Legal Prevention: Connecting Access to Civil Justice and Healthcare Through Medical-Legal Partnership, 35 J. Legal Med. 29, 37–38 (2014).
Supply v. Demand
Health Literacy
Legal Literacy
Call for Future Study
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Expressed Demand
1989
1994
2005
2009
2017
Presentation Title
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40% of households report >1 problem
20% receive help
47% of households report ≧ 1 problem
29% sought help
For every client helped by LSC, another eligible client turned away
Same as 2005
Notes that advice-only counts as “service”
More than half of clients receive limited or no help “because of a lack of resources”
Unexpressed Demand
“. . .they do not understand these situations to be legal.”
Rebecca L. Sandefur, Accessing Justice in the Contemporary USA: Findings from the Community Needs and Services Study, American Bar Association (2014) at 3.
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Health Literacy
https://health.gov/our-work/healthy-people/healthy-people-2030/health-literacy-healthy-people-2030
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Health Literacy (Mostly) Works
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Teaching Health Literacy
“Because schools have direct contact with more than 95 percent of our nation’s young people aged 5-17 years, they play a critical role in promoting the health and safety of young people and helping them establish lifelong healthy behavior patterns.”
– Centers for Disease Control (2016)
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What about legal literacy?
Defining Legal Literacy
U Mich professor James Boyd White:
“… that degree of competence in legal discourse required for meaningful and active life in our increasingly legalistic and litigious culture. The citizen who was ideally literate in this sense would not be expected to know how to draft deeds and wills or to try cases or to manage the bureaucratic maze, but he would know when and how to call up on the specialists who can do these things. More important, in the rest of his life he would be able to protect and advance his own interests: for example, in dealing with a landlord or a tenant, or in his interactions with the policy, with the zoning commission, or with the Social Security Administration.”
James Boyd White, The Invisible Discourse of the Law: Reflections on Legal Literacy and General Education, 54 U. Colo. L. Rev. 143, 144 (1983).
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Teaching Legal Literacy
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My Ideas
Ideally:
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