Justice by Design: Eviction (Law 806Y)
Three out of five people in civil cases have no lawyer, but are often navigating issues with profound legal importance to their lives. At the same time, the courts are trying to manage a massive volume of cases, with particularly large numbers of cases concerning housing and eviction. What are the new policies & services that can prevent evictions effectively, and promote housing stability?
This policy practicum will partner students with the NAACP, which is developing new eviction prevention pilots. Students will work on designing and evaluating new eviction pilots, including on how to get more community education around housing law, housing navigators to support people through the court process, and collaborative housing court models to promote better outcomes. We will work with interviews, observations, data-gathering, and workshops to understand how eviction cases work and what outcomes result. Students will map out opportunities for pilots and plan for how they can be evaluated. This class is part of a multi-year partnership to redesign the civil justice system so that it works better for all litigants, especially those without a lawyer. Students will learn how to do design research, facilitate multi-stakeholder system redesign, and envision a government innovation process. Their work will directly feed into future classes, pilots, and studies into how to make housing courts more efficient, accessible, and just.
