Delphine Bellerose, Law and Justice Foundation of New South Wales
Emily Kothe, Law and Justice Foundation of New South Wales
Kerryn Butler, Law and Justice Foundation of New South Wales
When a natural disaster strikes, the legal assistance sector must quickly mobilise significant resources to address the initial surge in legal needs. Providers and emergency managers often need to make swift decisions about service delivery and resource allocation before fully understanding the disaster's impact on legal needs. It is well-established that legal needs increase and evolve after natural disasters, with existing vulnerabilities often exacerbated. In Australia, the Law and Justice Foundation of New South Wales's previous work has shown that demographic data along with the Need for Legal Assistance (Community) and Need for Legal Assistance (Capability) indicators can provide estimates of potential legal needs in different geographic areas. This approach could be invaluable for disaster preparedness, helping to identify geographic regions that are particularly vulnerable and anticipate the types of legal problems that may arise in disaster-affected areas. This presentation offers a proof-of-concept, demonstrating how the development of tools and resources to inform community profiles by making various data sources easily accessible can be used to inform resource planning and allocation in the aftermath of a disaster, with a focus on specific geographic regions. Although the example is based in Australia, the methodology has broad applicability for enhancing disaster preparedness and response globally.
Kerryn Butler, Law and Justice Foundation of New South Wales
Emily Kothe, Law and Justice Foundation of New South Wales
Catriona Mirrlees-Black, Law and Justice Foundation of New South Wales
A systematic and evidence-based approach to identifying disaster-related legal needs is essential to ensuring access to justice for disaster-impacted people and communities. This presentation will outline the key findings from a comprehensive review of the Australian evidence on legal need in natural disaster areas, that are likely to have international applicability. The evidence shows distinct patterns of legal need (a) before a natural disaster, (b) in the immediate aftermath and (c) during the subsequent recovery period. Each phase manifests its own legal and practical issues thus requiring a tailored approach to ensure access to justice. While insurance, housing, and disaster-grant-related enquiries account for a substantial volume of disaster-related legal need, the breadth of legal problem types associated with disasters is notable. This includes novel disaster-related issues and the exacerbation of both the frequency and severity of ‘everyday’ problems. The types of disaster-related legal issues people experience, and the timing of those problems, are influenced not only by the scale and nature of each disaster but also by the characteristics of the communities impacted. The growing body of evidence on the legal needs of disaster-affected communities can be harnessed to inform resource-related planning and allocation. Continuing to build the evidence, particularly in the areas of disaster preparedness; client experience of disasters, referrals and services; and unmet legal need in the broader community, will also inform appropriately designed and sufficiently resourced service delivery planning for this most vital and challenging work by the legal assistance sector.
Andrew Pilliar, Thompson Rivers University Faculty of Law
Building on previous work which has argued for the creation of “justice epidemiology” as a new subfield in access to justice research, this presentation will further refine the concept. The presentation will briefly explain what justice epidemiology is and why it is needed before setting out a detailed normative framework for the field. The presentation will also map existing research that fits within the justice epidemiology framework, before detailing where further research is needed. The presentation will offer a broad research agenda for justice epidemiology, as well as an invitation for researchers to join the subfield. In doing so, the presentation will bring justice epidemiology into dialogue with other recent calls and developments, such as the American Bar Foundation’s Justice Data Observatory, the work of Pathfinders for Peaceful, Just, and Inclusive Societies, the World Justice Project’s work, and the OECD’s people-centred justice framework. In doing so, the presentation will explore why justice epidemiology can be useful as an ongoing subfield of research, rather than as a point-in-time project, and how it complements rather than detracts from each of these existing projects. The presentation will also canvass some opportunities to build out justice epidemiology, including: exploring potential research funding opportunities and partnerships; discussing potential organizations and institutions to involve in justice epidemiology; capacity-building needs and opportunities; and some ways to build on recent research.
Chris Povey, Justice Connect
CONTEXT
At Justice Connect, we see on a daily basis how our justice system fails people. Every year, millions of people miss out on legal help. Legal need both creates and perpetuates disadvantage, and we see how this undermines people’s health, housing, financial stability, and relationships.
In the face of growing need and shrinking budgets, the legal sector must now also contend with the impacts of climate change. When disasters occur, existing legal problems are exacerbated, and new legal needs emerge. Droughts, fires, heatwaves, heavy rainfall, and floods are further growing the population of people who need critical legal help.
For over a decade, Justice Connect has been responding to unmet legal need in the wake of disasters, and connecting people with free legal help when they need it most.
A DYNAMIC LEGAL RESPONSE
The status quo is not an option in how we respond to these crises. We need to intervene earlier to prevent legal problems from escalating. We need to be embedded within a systemic response that includes local communities, together with the agencies and services involved in disaster resilience. We need to leverage technology and dramatically increase the scale of people we can reach, and democratise accessible legal tools and information.
At Justice Connect, we respond to climate crises with a holistic approach. Each of Justice Connect's disaster initiatives has the following in common: they are imbued with the agility, ethics, and ambition of leveraging digital innovation to scale legal support.
We use emerging technology to scale our disaster responses and provide more help to individuals, small businesses, and community organisations (including those working on the disaster frontline). We build deep, collaborative partnerships across the legal and non-legal sectors to strengthen the ecosystem as a whole.
OUR PRESENTATION
This session will showcase our experience working with people impacted by disasters, and how this has shaped the increased sophistication of our work.
We’ll explain Justice Connect's digital innovation framework, and how we put it into action through our disaster response initiatives, including our:
- Disaster Legal Support Resource Hub,
- Get ePrepared self-help tool,
- Online legal clinic Justice Connect Answers, and
- Pro Bono Portal.
We'll share lessons in effective and ethical co-design, testing, iteration, stakeholder engagement, and digital product development. We’ll also explore future opportunities for leveraging Justice Connect’s innovative AI model – the first of its kind in Australia – which helps diagnose legal problems within everyday language.
Finally, we’ll share insights into our approach to trauma-informed outreach that respects principles like place-based support (particularly important for geographically isolated communities), and how we offer people the most appropriate pathway to justice.
Paul Prettitore, World Bank & Queen's University Belfast
We live in a law thick world where a complex web of law touches many aspects of our lives. Entanglement in this web can produce both positive and negative welfare effects on issues such as health, finances, family relationships, well-being and the sense of security and safety. However, not everyone is affected in the same way.
More recently the justice field has benefited from an increase in data, notably quantitative data from household surveys measuring legal problems, needs and gaps. Research stemming from this and other data suggests that legal problems and the hardships they produce are not distributed equally with justice often loaded against those with disadvantage. Persons facing social disadvantage report both more and more serious problems, as well as more serious consequences from these problems.
While the poor and non-poor tend to take action to address legal problems at similar rates, those more likely to experience legal problems tend to have less knowledge, resources and self-help skills to address them. Low-income households have less access to formal institutions for information, advice and dispute resolution, forcing them to rely more heavily on social networks and other mechanisms that may prove less effective.
To better understand the role of justice in development in the development context we are analyzing the distribution of justice through the allocation of burdens and opportunities across income groups. As a first step we are assessing the allocation of burdens in the form of legal problems, namely frequency, type and impact. This will build on earlier research through a meta-analysis of legal needs household surveys implemented by The Hague Institute for the Innovation of Law (HiiL), which suggested that low-income households were more likely to: experience legal problems; experience certain types of legal problems; and feel more negatively impacted by legal problems.
The ongoing research will use data from additional HiiL household surveys and more recent household surveys in Argentina, England and Wales, Australia and Colombia to i) assess whether previous findings remain valid and ii) analyze the distribution of additional burdens and potential opportunities that can be identified through new, more comprehensive surveys covering issues such as trust, legal capability and empowerment.
Ryan Sakoda, University of Iowa College of Law
Brian Farrell, University of Iowa College of Law
Daria Fisher Page, University of Iowa College of Law
Social vulnerability provides a useful model for analyzing legal demand in the context of access to justice. In geography, the concept describes social, cultural, economic, political, and institutional factors and/or processes that shape how individuals experience and recover from environmental hazards. Scholars created social vulnerability indices to anticipate differences in vulnerability to, and resilience from, hazardous events, to improve decision-making and resource allocation. We propose that a similar approach can be used to anticipate (and plan for) “legal vulnerability” in a particular community. Census Bureau data can be used to build a Legal Vulnerability Index (LVI) to anticipate the likelihood that individuals, with certain characteristics or histories, in a specific place, may experience justice problems.
In earlier work, we proposed moving from a pure supply-demand model to one that is based on legal need and legal resilience; less attorney-centric; and more intersectional. (Fisher Page & Farrell, 2023; Farrell et al., 2024) Legal vulnerability describes the probability that individuals with certain characteristics or histories in a specific place will experience justice problems. Legal vulnerability, when combined with other contextual factors, may give rise to a legal need, understood as a justice problem “that requires the application of legal (writ large) expertise… in order to be handled properly.” (Sandefur & Teufel, 2021)
We argue that the LVI would fill a gap left open by traditional tools used to measure legal need. Traditional surveys and assessments are often hyper-local, subjective, and vary in methodologies and substance, making cross-jurisdiction comparisons nearly impossible. Existing legal indices typically measure access to justice using attorney/court-focused variables and use data and methodology that make replication and testing difficult. Our LVI uses publicly available data, can be replicated and tested by other researchers, and makes cross-jurisdiction comparisons relatively straightforward.
The LVI is modeled on the Center for Disease Control Social Vulnerability Index (SVI). The SVI is composed of four categories of community characteristics (or “themes”) that existing literature identifies as being predictive of social vulnerability. Each of these categories consists of several Census variables. Like the SVI, the LVI will consist of several categories of variables that compose the overall index. These categories will be organized by areas of law, including housing, consumer, employment, family, disability, and immigration. We are identifying which variables to include in the categories of our index. At the conference, we would discuss our goals for the index, the challenges of constructing the index, and present our “draft” sub-indices and initial applications of the LVI.