(Originally published in Vol. 108 No. 1 (2024) of Judicature)

A new approach to bringing people access to justice “centers the justice experiences of ordinary people, rather than the structure or staffing of justice institutions, the elements of legal families, or the content of laws themselves.” This “people-centered” approach requires not just a paradigm shift, but also empirical evidence as a critical tool to redesign systems.

Though evidence-based approaches are standard practice in other fields, like health, they are rare in law. But this is changing. We describe two projects that create regulatory environments to enable evidence-based, people-centered services, each endorsed by its respective state supreme courts: the Utah legal regulatory “Sandbox” and the Alaska Community Justice Worker Program.

Utah’s Sandbox allows legal-services-providing entities to explore new business structures and service models, including services that are technology based, offered by people who are not attorneys, or financed or owned by nonlawyers. Entities in the Sandbox are closely monitored through the regular collection and analysis of service data to ensure that consumers are protected from harm.

(Continue reading the article on Judicature’s page here.)