Thais Cattani Perroni, Éducaloi
Immigrant women may face greater barriers related to access to justice when they are considering breaking up with or divorcing their intimate partner. Language barriers, lack of knowledge about the legal system, a limited support network and financial difficulties are some examples of these access to justice barriers. In this context, these women may seek support from the frontline workers at local community organizations who are already helping them with other issues. Because these frontline workers have a relationship of trust with their clients, they function as trusted intermediaries between their clients and a legal system that can be complex and difficult to navigate alone. This presentation will discuss the ongoing project (Partir et) se reconstruire (Leaving and Rebuilding, in English), created by the public legal education organization Éducaloi, in partnership with two community organizations. The project consists of a series of legal information workshops for immigrant women. These workshops inform participants about the immediate and long-term legal consequences of separating or getting a divorce and are meant to be facilitated by frontline community workers. Given that these workers often do not have a legal background, one of the project’s goals is to share Éducaloi’s expertise in public legal education and clear communication by providing them with the tools and legal information necessary to confidently facilitate the workshops. The presentation will share some insights from the project related to the role of frontline community workers as trusted intermediaries in facilitating immigrant women’s access to justice in Quebec. Notably, partnerships between public legal education organizations like Éducaloi and trusted intermediaries like frontline community workers have the potential to increase access to justice for immigrant women by leveraging complementary roles, expertise and strengths.
Antonio Coronado, Innovation for Justice
As numerous reports, student movements, and forms of scholarship-activism have noted, the traditional U.S. law school remains a space of hierarchy, privilege, and unnamed systems of power. Particularly for students holding historically and continuously marginalized identities, U.S. legal education remains both a remnant of and conduit for harmful pedagogies. In recognition of these realities, this session explores the transformative potential and power-building aims of Innovation for Justice’s “Community Legal Education” Initiatives: Legal empowerment courses that train individuals who are already in community-helping roles to provide limited-scope legal advice as community-based justice workers. In reflecting on the subversive doctrinal values upon which law schools might be (re)founded, this presentation invites attendees to reflect on the ways that legal empowerment; trauma-informed advocacy; procedural, racial, and disability justices; experiential and lifelong learning; and community-responsive curricula might guide the future work of justice-making. As a result of this session, attendees can expect to identify the systemic potential of regulatory reform to unauthorized practice of law (UPL) restrictions and the re-regulation of justice work from a community-driven perspective; develop a working knowledge of strategies for recognizing and elevating the inherent, lived expertise of community-based advocates in advancing justice work; and appreciate the importance for intentional, trauma-informed, and community-driven methodologies for legal education and advocacy. As this program will explore, it is only through conscious, collective processes of (re)imagination that we might forge a future where legal education everywhere is premised on a shared, collective right to legal power.
Ricardo Lillo, Universidad Adolfo Ibañez, School of Law
In this paper, I describe the experience of the academic program implemented by the People-Centered Justice Lab of the Universidad Adolfo Ibañez from Chile, called “Legal Design and Access to Justice”. This course for advanced students of law, engineering and design aims to provide an experiential learning space for groups of students to work in an interdisciplinary way and with a project-based learning methodology to develop proposals to expand access to civil justice in our country. The projects developed by our students, under the guidance of the faculty that make up the lab team, are based on real challenges presented by institutions of the justice system, whose proposed solutions are developed according to methodologies, tools and a human-centered design mentality. In this way, our students have the opportunity to develop legal design skills, to deepen their knowledge by applying their own disciplines to real problems and contexts related to access to justice, to develop interdisciplinary work, collaboration and communication skills, and to improve their argumentation skills and autonomy.
During the first version of the course, the challenge was provided by the Family Court of Osorno and it was referred to how to improve access to justice for people with alimony cases before the family justice system. The problem is that currently, once a court has decided on an alimony case, the detailed monthly statement with the payment order that people receive is completely incomprehensible or, as we discovered, is not even received by the parties. This results in a delay or increase in unpaid alimony, as well as an increase in litigation in these matters, which in turn affects the functioning of the family justice system. Therefore, the challenge our students addressed was how to improve the system of notification of this detailed statement of alimony payments to the end users of justice, especially people who do not have lawyers, whether they are alimony debtors or creditors.
In this course, law and design students collaboratively developed a technological and end-user-focused solution through a design thinking process. This process consisted of analyzing the current documents and communication process of the Family Court, developing a prototype solution, interviewing end-users about their current experience, and obtaining feedback on the prototype. End users of justice were interviewed from a database provided by the Family Court of Osorno, following a qualitative methodology until saturation point. With the same users interviewed, a process of iteration of different versions of the prototype was carried out.
At the end of the semester, our students made a final presentation in the form of an elevator pitch to the judicial authorities, the National Association of Judges and the Administrative Corporation of the Judicial Branch. While we are in discussions with the judiciary for an escalation and implementation phase, the experience is already a success for our team. It created a space where students had to work in an interdisciplinary way to address the problem with a focus on the people the family courts are supposed to serve. Students from a variety of backgrounds had the opportunity to develop the skills necessary to address public challenges in an interdisciplinary way, following the philosophy of user-centered design, and applying the knowledge and skills they already had to a real problem that needed to be approached in a different way.