The Who Cares Question
Now that I’m close – oh, so close! – to wrapping up my initial survey of available law online, as well as surveyed that which is available via law libraries, I’m brought to Part Two of my research. The “who cares?” question. Yes, government publication of law online seems woefully inadequate…but can I prove it? What does information poverty mean in the context of the legal needs of the public? How can one assess the legal needs of the public?
No, seriously, I’m looking to crowdsource some research help here…how would you assess the legal information needs of the general public (or of the practicing bar, for that matter.)?
Some ideas:
- Look at some number of cases published (All state supreme court cases in 2015, which btw according to CourtListener is a couple of thousand) and check their Table of Authorities?
- Use something like Rich Leiter’s Leading Case Service as a corpus to see what the “most important” cases are, and their authorities are available?
- See the most cited cases under a certain selection of West Key Numbers (e.g. Employment, Landlord Tenant, etc. You know, biggies. No offense to 245 LOGS AND LOGGING) and check the TOA
- Ethnographic interviews of pro se patrons (I honestly don’t think I have the resources to do this one in the time and depth it would need to be done.)
- See if I can get some search query data out of online legal research sites? (May apply to the West Key Number selection above.)
I mean, is there really no list or article out there on the most common legal information/research/help needs of the general public or even research on what the most common legal problems facing people are? I’m must be missing the correct search term.
Rutgers Law Library is a public library and so I tried “pew research on pro se litigants” and found a few hits and thought this 2011 PDF may be helpful.
http://www.fjc.gov/public/pdf.nsf/lookup/proseusdc.pdf/$file/proseusdc.pdf
You may have seen this too from National Center of State Courts
http://www.ncsc.org/Topics/Access-and-Fairness/Self-Representation/Resource-Guide.aspx
A couple thoughts that may not be especially helpful –
I don’t know a good way to measure this, but my legal aid hotline coworkers and I can give much, much better advice in the limited time available when we have access to online dockets that have pdfs of the pleadings in eviction cases. Anecdotally, it seems like most of our success stories come from the few courts that provide online pleadings.
I also believe that it is necessary to give pro se clients access to and copies of the source documents of law, even if they don’t read and understand them. In my experience, nobody believes what a tenant in subsidized housing says, even if they are right. But they may believe the copy of the law or the page from HUD Handbook 4350.3 that the tenant gives them.
I think I could get permission to give pro se clients a link to a survey that you create, but I’m sure that’s not the type of ethnographic research you are talking about.
Is there any chance of collaborating with Matthew Desmond or Jim Greiner?
Personally, I think measuring how our local court system is functioning is a necessary prerequisite to measuring any kinds of interventions. But that’s going to require a huge collaborative effort, and the National Summit on Innovations in Legal Services convinced me that’s not going to come from the institutions of the legal industry.
I wonder if there’s a corpus of questions & follow-ups somewhere that you could mine? Anonymized, a public law library’s reference database could be really interesting. If anyone’s using something like LibAnswers, where all the follow-up is contained in one place, you might be able to extract it (though it might not be pretty).
I’ve always thought that a comparative analysis around open access to legal info would be useful. How are legal materials made available in other polities and jurisdictions? How has the availability or scarcity of accessible resources relative to our own affected these other systems?