Varsha Aithala is an Assistant Professor and a PhD candidate at the National Law School of India University. Her research interests span the areas of private law, social investment, law and technology and legal system reform. She has a Master’s degree in Corporate Law from the University of Cambridge and a Bachelor’s degree in Law from Nalsar University of Law. Previously, she was Research Fellow and faculty at the School of Policy and Governance, Azim Premji University. She has a decade of practice experience as a corporate and commercial lawyer in India and the United Kingdom.
Natalia Antolak-Saper is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Law, Monash University. Natalia graduated from Monash University with a Bachelor of Arts, majoring in Criminology, and a Bachelor of Laws with First Class Honours. She completed her professional training with Lander & Rogers Lawyers, and was admitted to practice as a Barrister and Solicitor of the Supreme Court of Victoria and of the High Court of Australia. She has published articles on diverse topics including directed verdicts, bail conditions, and gambling regulation. She teaches criminal law in the LLB and JD programs at Monash. Her research areas are in comparative criminal law and procedure with a particular focus on unrepresented and under-represented accused, the intersectionality between the civil and criminal justice systems gendered violence, and sentencing.
Dr. Daniela Barba is the Director of Research on Access to Justice at the World Justice Project. In her role, she develops and executes research on a variety of themes pertaining to people-centered justice, including global, regional, and country-specific projects. She conducts and oversees the development, writing, and design of theoretical frameworks, research proposals, and quantitative and qualitative analyses related to these projects.
Before joining the WJP, Daniela was a postdoctoral fellow at LAPOP Lab at Vanderbilt University. She comes to the WJP with a Ph.D. and an M.A. in Politics and Social Policy from Princeton University, an M.A. in Comparative Politics from New York University, and a B.A. in International Relations from El Colegio de México. In her doctoral research, she investigated the patterns of human rights violations by law enforcement during their war against organized criminal organizations in Mexico. Her research interests include the rule of law, access to justice, gender-based violence, and human rights accountability.
Delphine Bellerose is a Principal Researcher at the Law and Justice Foundation of NSW. She has played a key role in developing an evidence base on legal needs to inform policies and support service planning. With extensive experience in both qualitative and quantitative approaches, Delphine has worked across a range of settings and sectors. She has great expertise in the analysis of large administrative datasets to support the justice system in Australia, and has developed tools to make existing data accessible to the sector.
Erik Bornmann is the Director, Guided Pathways at CLEO (Community Legal Education Ontario / Éducation juridique
communautaire Ontario). CLEO develops practical legal education and information to help people understand and
exercise their legal rights. At CLEO, Erik leads the Guided Pathways group, which develop and operate direct-to-public
online tools for document assembly and public legal information. Before joining CLEO, Erik worked as a litigation
lawyer at the Community Legal Clinic – Simcoe, Haliburton, Kawartha Lakes, a general service poverty law clinic in
Ontario.
Jérémy Boulanger-Bonnelly is an Assistant Professor at McGill University’s Faculty of Law and a member of the Quebec Bar. His research focuses on access to justice in civil matters, using primarily comparative methods. His current projects focus, among other topics, on person-centred justice and the role of public participation in improving access to justice, mainly through lay courts. More broadly, his work extends to various areas of law, including private law, civil procedure, judicial institutions, and constitutional law.
In 2023, Jérémy completed his doctoral studies at the University of Toronto, where his research was supported by a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship and a Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholarship. He also worked as a civil litigator, a law clerk at the Supreme Court of Canada, and an intern at UNIDROIT, an international organization working on harmonizing private law. In 2022, he was a Visiting Researcher at Harvard Law School. In parallel to his teaching and research, Professor Boulanger-Bonnelly strives to contribute to access to justice through community initiatives, including pro bono constitutional challenges.
Justice Brown was appointed to the Court of Appeal for Ontario in December, 2014. Prior to his appointment he had sat as a judge of the Superior Court of Justice of Ontario in the Toronto Region since September, 2006, including sitting on the Toronto Region Commercial List and on the Divisional Court.
Before his appointment to the Bench he was a partner with Stikeman Elliott LLP (Toronto) in its Litigation and Energy Groups.
Justice Brown was an Adjunct Professor of Law at Osgoode Hall Law School teaching Energy Law from 2004 until 2006, and a Sessional Lecturer at Queen’s University Law School from 1990 to 2002 teaching Trial Advocacy. Justice Brown earned his B.A. (Hons.) from the University of Toronto in 1976, a Certificate from the Beijing Languages Institute in 1977, a Diploma from Nanjing University in 1978, a J.D. in 1981 from the University of Toronto, and a L.L.M. (Constitutional Law) from Osgoode Hall Law School in 2005. Justice Brown was called to the Ontario Bar in 1983.
Meredith is a Canadian justice sector leader and change-maker dedicated to helping institutions and organizations understand and enhance their positive impact. Drawing upon her experience designing and implementing sustainable projects and systems, Meredith leads the evaluations practice at CALIBRATE.
Prior to joining Calibrate, Meredith spent 17 years with the Ministry of the Attorney General for Ontario as a labour and employment lawyer and in court administration to tackle the challenges facing that system. She served as Chief Legal Counsel to three Deputy Attorneys General. She was the Executive Director of MAG’s Innovation Office introducing a culture of transformation and delivering successful change by working creatively with private sector, judicial, and community representatives
Natasha Brown is Director of Access to Justice & Community Engagement at the University of Manitoba, Faculty of Law (Robson Hall). She leads access to justice initiatives and coordinates work among stakeholders. She was previously Director of Professional Practice & Externships at Robson Hall and Legal Director of the Legal Help Centre of Winnipeg (“LHC”). She worked in private practice, exclusively in the area of family law, from 2006 until she joind LHC in 2012. She teaches “Access to Justice” at Robson Hall and is an elected council member of the Manitoba Bar Association.
Matthew Burnett is the Senior Program Officer at the American Bar Foundation.
Kerryn Butler, Principal Researcher at the Law and Justice Foundation of NSW, leads applied social science research initiatives to advance access to justice. Specialising in program evaluation and understanding access to justice barriers, her work supports evidence-based service provision and policy. She does this by promoting evaluative approaches and developing actionable insights for policymakers and providers. She is passionate about building capacity for research-informed practice and policy in the legal sector.
Thais Cattani Perroni is an Education Specialist at Éducaloi, a non-profit organization dedicated to public legal education and information in Quebec, Canada. With a master’s degree in education and a background as a trained history teacher, Thais brings a unique perspective to her role. At Éducaloi, she creates and enhances legal education tools specifically for Quebec’s English‐speaking communities. As a professional with a diverse background, she is keen to explore the role of non-legal professionals in supporting the development of effective public legal education initiatives aimed to improve access to justice for underserved populations.
Elizabeth Chambliss is the Henry Harman Edens Professor of Law and Director of the NMRS Center on Professionalism at the University of South Carolina Joseph F. Rice School of Law. Her scholarship focuses on access to justice and the regulation of the legal profession. Her most recent research is a mixed methods study of private practice in rural South Carolina. Professor Chambliss a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation and a member of the American Law Institute. She serves on the SC Access to Justice Commission and the Editorial Advisory Board of Law & Society Review.
Zoe (she/her) is Anika Legal’s Principal Lawyer, and is responsible for the design and operation of Anika’s legal services, and management and mentorship of around 50 volunteers at any time within the practice. Under Zoe’s leadership, Anika has launched two new services over 2 years, grown its online legal resources offerings into 10 different languages, and doubled our service capacity and efficiency. Throughout her career, Zoe has focused on optimizing the use of digital tools and spaces to increase service efficacy and efficiency – so that we can more easily reach people who need legal empowerment where they are. Having previously worked at Justice Connect and, internationally, as a PILnet fellow, Zoe has gained exposure into the design and operation of varied legal empowerment initiatives in diverse settings.
Professor Chiodo joined the faculty at Osgoode Hall Law School in July 2022. From 2020 to 2022, she was a visiting professor at Western University Faculty of Law, where she taught civil procedure, class actions and other litigation-related courses. Prior to that, she taught tort and criminal law as a stipendiary lecturer at the University of Oxford and legal process as an adjunct faculty member at Osgoode.
Professor Chiodo has published widely in her field. Her book The Class Actions Controversy: The Origins and Development of the Ontario Class Proceedings Act was based on her LLM thesis and was published in 2018 by Irwin Law and the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History. It won the Peter Oliver Prize in Canadian Legal History and was shortlisted for the 2019 Legislative Assembly of Ontario Speaker’s Book Award. She has written a chapter in Class Actions in Canada (Emond Montgomery, 2018), and has published numerous articles in the U.K.’s Civil Justice Quarterly, the Osgoode Hall Law Journal, Canadian Class Action Review and other journals in Canada and the United Kingdom.
Staff Lawyer, Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario (ACTO)
Loralei (Lori) Colquhoun hails from the Interlake and has lived most of her life in Manitoba. Having worked in the private and public sectors, she maintained a high volume litigation practice for 28 years before joining the Community Legal Education Association in 2022 for the development and implementation of the federally funded Victims of Intimate Partner Violence Project.
Lori has practiced in the areas of criminal, civil, administrative and real estate law, maintaining throughout her career a focus on Family Law and Child Protection. Her other professional experience and training include union advocacy, High Performance Leadership, Mediation and Collaborative Law.
Having started out as an articling student providing legal representation to emergency shelter clients, Lori has continued to act on behalf of victims and survivors since her call to the bar in 1994. In her current role, Lori offers support to those impacted by relationship, domestic and gender- based abuse while partnering with service providers and other experts to create relevant educational opportunities for professionals and community members throughout the province.
Antonio M. Coronado (they/them/elle) is Professor of Practice/Community Legal Education Lead at Innovation for Justice, a social justice legal innovation lab jointly housed by the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law and the University of Utah David Eccles School of Business. Here, they support the expansion, evaluation, and programmatic development of i4J’s efforts to train and certify community-based justice workers in Arizona and Utah. In their work as an interdisciplinary storyteller and cross-jurisdictional advocate, Antonio seeks to build community legal power, center the experiences of multiply marginalized peoples, and honor the scholarships of fellow queer and trans* writers of color. As an abolitionist educator, they are dedicated to pedagogical practices of dreaming, disrupting, and radical reflection.
Naomi is a Professor of Law and Society at the University of Kent. She teaches public law, socio-legal theory and methods, and AI in dispute resolution (at Oxford). Her interests in administrative and civil justice systems and ADR (as pathways of informal dispute resolution) have a broader scope, addressing questions of access to justice, vulnerability, digitalisation and consumer protection.
Expert in access to justice and legal empowerment. International research utilised by regulatory bodies, governments, and NGOs.
Commissioned Project Lead by Consumer Panel Legal Services Board England and Wales for empirical research on the role of regulators in facilitating access to justice and unmet legal need. The report is due for release soon.
Evaluated and conducted research into effective legal assistance services since 2011 (legal aid commissions, community legal centres, for regulators and Health Justice Partnerships). Includes the longest, sustained longitudinal study of a legal service in Australia, the ‘Invisible Hurdles Program’. Her evidence-based reports have secured continuing funding for many services. Currently 5-year research on a Health Justice Partnership (Hume Riverina Community Legal Service and the Albury Wodonga Aboriginal Health Service). Evaluation Adviser for Law for Life UK; Editorial Board Evaluation Journal of Australasia and Board of Nottingham Law Centre. ‘Expert adviser’ to the Law Council of Australia ‘Justice Project’.
Published extensively (peer and practitioner, industry reports, chapters on access to justice). Book, Better Law for a Better World (Routledge, 2021) used and referred to by regulators, judicial members, charities, and the legal profession. Nottingham Law School’s ‘Research Impact Lead’ and Associate Professor.
Ab Currie, Ph.D. (Sociology, University of Toronto) is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Canadian Forum on Civil Justice where he is mainly involved in research on various topics related to the everyday legal problems experienced by the public.
He is also presently conducting research with a number of community legal clinics in Ontario on innovations in service delivery based on outreach, and developing people-centered and community-focussed approaches to justice. Prior to joining the Canadian Forum Ab was Principal Researcher at the Department of Justice Canada where he conducted research in legal aid and other areas of access to justice for more than three decades. He has conducted extensive research in criminal and civil legal aid, including unmet need for criminal legal aid and four national legal needs studies in Canada.
The Honourable Doug Downey is the Attorney General of Ontario, and the Member of Provincial Parliament (MPP) for Barrie – Springwater – Oro-Medonte. As Minister, Doug is focused on addressing operational issues within the justice system in order to simplify the court process for all Ontarians. Doug stands for a fair and equitable court system that allows for all Ontarians to receive fair representation and access to the justice system in a timely manner.Doug was raised in Bond Head, and has spent much of his life working and living throughout Simcoe County. He obtained his Hons. B.A. from Wilfrid Laurier University; M.A. specializing in Judicial Administration from Brock University; a Law Degree from Dalhousie University at Halifax; and a Master of Laws in Municipal and Development Law through Osgoode Hall Law School. He has served as a Professor for Laurentian University at Georgian College, taught for the Real Estate Bar Admission Course, and occasionally lectured when asked.
He is a founding partner at Downey, Tornosky, Lassaline & Timpano Law Professional Corporation and has earned professional recognition including the Lawyer of the Year award from the Simcoe County Law Association, the Business Leader of the Year by the Orillia Business Association, and as one of Canada’s Leading Lawyers by Lexpert magazine. He has extensive experience in politics from working as a city councilor, to chairing the Independent Panel on the Future of the Trent-Severn Waterway, the largest federal asset in Ontario. The panel’s work has resulted in over $625 million in investments into upgrading the Waterway’s infrastructure.
Doug has also been active in numerous community organizations, including the Orillia and District Chamber of Commerce, the Orillia Kiwanis Club, Big Brothers/Big Sisters of Orillia and District, the Orillia Area Community Development Corporation and hosted Politically Speaking on Rogers television for 8 years. His volunteer work has earned him the Order of Orillia, and the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal.
Daniel Escott, a lawyer and LLM Candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School, led the development and implementation of policies to manage the risks and maximize the benefits posed by artificial intelligence at Canada’s Federal Court. His research focuses primarily on the relationship between technology and meaningful access to justice.
Professor Trevor Farrow is Dean of Osgoode Hall Law School and is internationally recognized as a leading scholar on access to justice, legal process and the profession. He is regularly consulted and invited to participate at conferences, expert panels, policy initiatives and justice projects in Canada and around the world, including as a research expert on the OECD’s Advisory Justice Research Consortium. Professor Farrow has been awarded numerous Canadian and international grants to conduct innovative and ground-breaking research, including his $1 million SSHRC “Costs of Justice” grant, which was the first national study of its kind to look at financial and other costs associated with access to justice in Canada. Professor Farrow is consistently ranked in the top 10% of authors on SSRN by all-time and annual downloads and his research is widely cited and relied on by researchers, policy makers, governments, judges and the media in Canada and around the world.
Kate Fischer Doherty is the Director of Clinics at Melbourne Law School, The University of Melbourne. In this role she oversees a suite of seven law clinics and an extensive public interest legal internship program, for which she is the subject coordinator.
Kate is experienced in the design and development of clinical and experiential learning opportunities. She has designed and co-designed several new clinics, including Street Law: Community Legal Empowerment and Indigenous Legal Advocacy Clinic. In 2024 Kate was a co-organiser of the international Wellness for Law Forum. An edited collection of papers from the Forum will be published by LexisNexis in late 2024.
Kate has been a finalist for the Lawyers Weekly Women in Law Awards for Academic of the Year. In 2023 the MLS Clinics program was shortlisted for an Engagement Australia Excellence Award for Outstanding Engagement for Student Learning.
Prior to joining MLS in 2015, Kate worked in the community legal sector for more than 10 years. She is admitted to practice law in Victoria.
Ellie Frazier is a Ph.D. candidate in Politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research and teaching focus on comparative politics and legal studies, particularly critical perspectives on access to justice, legal empowerment, and rule of law. Her current project focuses on the history and lived experience of community paralegals in South Africa and their impact on global access to justice movements. Her work has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the Fulbright Commission. She has previously worked with the Supreme Court and paralegal offices in Rwanda and Sierra Leone, respectively, including projects with USAID, Timap for Justice, and Freedom House’s Freedom in the World Index.
Vivian Galanis serves as the Head of Legal and a Board Director at Wallumatta Legal – a disruptive not-for-profit initiative redefining the provision of family law services in Australia. Vivian is an experienced legal practitioner having specialised in family law since she was admitted as a Solicitor of the Supreme Court of New South Wales and the High Court of Australia in 2015. Vivian’s expertise spans across all areas of family law. Having worked at a prestigious national firm and in the Community Legal Centre sector, she has a unique understanding of the complexities and challenges faced by those with intersectional disadvantage.
Her advocacy extends beyond the courtroom as she passionately leads a team of legal professionals, students and secondees in the delivery of affordable family law services. Vivian brings a wealth of experience and innovation to the table through her work at Wallumatta Legal, challenging traditional law firm models and forward movement towards an equitable and accessible legal system for all.
Vivian regularly delivers legal education and training for solicitors in the community legal sector to improve outcomes for priority groups. Vivian holds a Bachelor of Laws and a Bachelor of Business from the University of Technology Sydney.
Luis Guevara. Economist, Master in Economics from the Universidad Externado de Colombia. Master in Behavioural Sciences from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Currently leading the access to justice team at the National Planning Department in Colombia.
Ernesto Cardenas. Ernesto Cardenas holds a Ph.D. and Master of Science (MSc) in Economics from the University of Siena, Italy, and a Master of Arts (MA) in Peace and Conflict Studies from the University of Manitoba and the University of Winnipeg. His research interests are development economics, health economics, political economy, and peacebuilding. His research has been published in high-impact peer-reviewed academic journals such as Child Indicators Research, Journal of Urban Health, Digital Health, and Small Wars and Insurgencies. He works as a Senior Economist at Waapihk, a Winnipeg-based research firm, and as a Seasonal Instructor at the Department of Economics at the University of Winnipeg.
Lynne has been the Executive Director of the Victoria Law Foundation for 7 years, which works in empirical legal research, education and grant-making.
Her first career was in radio working with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for 16 years across many programs and networks.
In between, she held executive roles at the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, the City of Melbourne, the Victorian Ombudsman and as a consultant.
She has degrees in Law and English from the University of Western Australia and holds qualifications from the Australian Institute of Company Directors, the Institute of Community Directors Australia and has attended the Cranlana Centre for Ethical Leadership.
Associate Dean at College of Law, University of Saskatchewan
Bonnie Rose Hough is a consultant on access to justice issues. She worked for the State of California court system for over 25 years on a variety of initiatives to help the courts serve marginalized and low-income people. Her team developed the first state court self-help website in 2001, and has gone on to create a variety of document assembly, live chat, fillable forms, on-line training and other solutions including attorney-staffed, in-person, self-help centers in every court in California. She has been following the development of legal aid kiosks since they were first funded in California in 1999 and is currently working on research assessing their effectiveness.
Natasha Jaczek is a queer, settler lawyer and PhD student at the Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa. She co-developed and co-facilitated Inuusuktunut Maligalirinirmut Ikajuqtiit, a public legal education (PLE) program that emphasizes youth-led, culturally responsive, everyday legal pluralism. Her research focuses on legal empowerment, critical pedagogy, legal pluralism, and community-based PLE programs designed to raise young people’s critical legal consciousness.
Claire Johnson Raba is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Illinois Chicago, where she teaches Civil Procedure, Consumer Law, and courses on using legal technology to solve access to justice problems. She is a 2023-24 American Bar Foundation / JPB Foundation Access to Justice Scholar and a co-principal investigator with the Debt Collection Lab. Professor Johnson Raba’s scholarship focuses on access to civil justice and the impact of the civil legal system on low-income borrowers and their communities. At the intersection of big data, emerging legal technologies, consumer protection, and racial and social justice, her research is directed at substantively improving the experiences of self-represented litigants in state court. Her work is published in the Fordham Urban Law Journal, the St. John’s Law Review, on the Debt Collection Lab, and is forthcoming in the Review of Banking and Financial Law. Prior to joining academia, Professor Johnson Raba was a legal aid civil litigator representing low-income consumers in state, federal, and bankruptcy court.
Danielle Kalil is the Director of Civil Justice and the Judiciary at IAALS. In this role, Kalil is responsible for leading the vision and strategy of IAALS’ work around civil justice reform and the judiciary, working towards a more accessible, fair, efficient, and accountable civil justice system that works for everyone.
Kalil joined IAALS in 2023 after five years in the Human Trafficking Clinic + Lab at Michigan Law School. In that role, she supervised law students providing direct representation to clients in a variety of legal areas. She also supervised multidisciplinary teams of graduate students using design thinking to develop innovative, systemic solutions to vulnerability. Throughout her career, Kalil has been an advocate for interdisciplinary collaboration and looking beyond traditional legal tools to solve problems in the legal system.
Prior to teaching at Michigan, Kalil worked as a legal aid attorney in Texas, representing foster youth, immigrants, and survivors of human trafficking and sexual assault.
Justice Andromache Karakatsanis was appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada in October 2011. She had been appointed a judge of the Court of Appeal for Ontario in March 2010 and a judge of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in December 2002.
Following her call to the Bar in 1982, Andromache Karakatsanis served as a law clerk to the Ontario Court of Appeal. In private practice, she practised criminal, civil and family litigation in Toronto for several years. She then served in the Ontario Public Service for 15 years in a number of senior positions.
During her career in public service, Andromache Karakatsanis served as Chair and Chief Executive Officer of the Liquor Licence Board of Ontario (1988-95); as Assistant Deputy Attorney General and Secretary for Native Affairs (1995-97); and as Deputy Attorney General (1997-2000).
Andromache Karakatsanis served as Ontario’s Secretary of the Cabinet and Clerk of the Executive Council from July 2000 to November 2002. As the province’s senior public servant, she provided leadership to the Ontario Public Service and to the deputy ministers.
While in the public service, Justice Karakatsanis was actively involved in issues related to education and reform in the field of administrative justice. She was a recipient of the Society of Ontario Adjudicators and Regulators (SOAR) Medal in 1996 for outstanding service to Ontario’s administrative justice system.
Gerard Kennedy is assistant professor in the Faculty of Law, University of Alberta, where he teaches and researches procedural law, constitutional law, and the legal profession. He was previously on faculty at the University of Manitoba’s Faculty of Law. He is (co-)author of five books and dozens of articles. His work has been cited by numerous courts, including the Supreme Court of Canada. He was previously a litigator at Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP. He serves on Canada’s Federal Courts Rules Committee and is a member of the Alberta, Manitoba, and Ontario bars.
Jon Khan is a lawyer and PhD candidate. His research expertise is judicial decision-making, judicial independence, written judicial decisions, empirical legal research, and using human-centred design in legal reform. His PhD research builds on previous research to examine how judicial decision-making and judicial decisions interact with Canada’s access to justice crisis, Canada’s data deficit, and the absence of deliberate design in Canada’s legal system. His research objective is two-fold: create and analyze datasets about Canada’s legal system; design improvements for judicial decision-making and written judicial decisions. His work has been relied on in academic publications and has appeared in the Globe & Mail. Jon has served as a course instructor at Osgoode Hall Law School, a subject matter teaching expert at Lincoln Alexander School of Law, a litigator with the Federal Department of Justice, a law clerk at the British Columbia Supreme Court, and a research fellow at the University of Ottawa. He holds a BA in History and Philosophy (York University), an LLB (University of Ottawa), and an LLM (University of Toronto).
Nicki Lees is a Special Counsel in the Social Justice Practice at Maurice Blackburn Lawyers. In this role, she has run and led strategic human rights litigation for over 8 years.
Nicki has recently been involved in the creation of Exhibit A-I, one of the most comprehensive accounts of daily life on both Manus Island and Nauru, and the focus on Nicki’s presentation at the A2J forum. This is a project collating dozens of witness statements filed in the course of litigation against the Commonwealth of Australia. Working in partnership with the individuals, the witness statements were fed into AI technology to generate photorealistic images of what took place on Nauru and Manus Island. Exhibit A-I can be viewed here: https://www.exhibitai.com.au/
Nicki holds a Masters in International Law (with Distinction) from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. Nicki is the Chair of the Australian Lawyers’ Alliance Human Rights Committee and an Advisory Council member of the Stateless Children Australia Network.
I have keen research and pragmatic interests in how the “health justice approach” helps vulnerable communities access justice, fosters multidisciplinary problem solving and health equity, offers an enhanced model for legal practice, and increases professional competence. I am the former Executive Director/Lawyer of the Community Advocacy & Legal Centre (Belleville, ON). In that role, I helped oversee local justice & health partnership development, and promoted scaling up of the model through a provincial community of practice. I have also researched and written about how these partnerships have evolved in Australia, Canada, the United States, and United Kingdom, and how they have been evaluated. This included co-authoring a scoping review about their impact with Queen’s University’s Department of Family Medicine. I graduated in 2023 with PhD from Queen’s Faculty of Law. My dissertation research focused on enhancing university legal education to include integrative reflective practice as a professional competency, and nurturing an access to justice consciousness and conscience. I have a Master’s in Adult Education, and law and undergraduate degrees. I have been involved in legal empowerment work internationally as a volunteer, and advocating holistic approaches to providing legal services characteristic of Ontario’s community legal clinic system.
Jennifer Leitch, JD, LLM, PhD is a researcher and teacher, primarily in legal ethics and professionalism, access to justice, and dispute processes. Her PhD dissertation at Osgoode engaged empirical research involving self-represented litigants’ experiences participating in the civil justice system. She continues to research and publish in the fields of access to justice, legal ethics and dispute resolution processes. She has taught legal ethics and professionalism, legal procedure, as well as torts. She also practiced civil litigation at Goodmans LLP in Toronto for 10 years. Currently, she is the Executive Director of the National Self-Represented Litigant Project and the Associate Director in the Ethics, Society & Law program at Trinity College, University of Toronto.
Research Associate, Duke Law School
Doctor of Juridical Science (S.J.D) and Master of Laws (LL.M) in Public Interest Law and Policy, University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). He holds a degree in Law and Social Sciences from Universidad Diego Portales, Chile.
Ricardo Lillo joined the Law School of Universidad Adolfo Ibañez in 2021 as a full-time faculty member. Currently, he is also the Director of the People-Centered Justice Lab at the same university. In the past, he has been research and doctoral coordinator of the Law School of the Universidad Diego Portales and researcher of the Procedural Reforms and Litigation Program of the same university, Transnational Criminal Justice Program Research Fellow at UCLA, and researcher of the Justice Studies Center of the Americas (CEJA).
His main areas of research are litigation law, judicial reforms, and the functioning of the justice system. In particular, his most recent work focuses on issues related to access to civil justice, due process, as well as the use of information and communication technologies in justice systems.
Belinda Lo is the Principal Lawyer of Eastern Community Legal Centre in metropolitan Melbourne and has more than 20 years’ experience in the legal sector.
Diana Lowe, KC is a lawyer with 40 years of experience which includes legal practice, research and reform of the civil and family justice systems in Canada, and most recently as Executive Counsel to the Chief Justice of the Court of King’s Bench of Alberta. Since retiring from the Court in late 2020, Diana has established a consulting practice – “Re-imagining Justice”. She continues to support the Reforming the Family Justice System (RFJS) initiative in Alberta, and also works with other jurisdictions interested in justice system transformation.
Executive Director, Newfoundland and Labrador Human Rights Commission
Milan Markovic is a Professor of Law, Presidential Impact Fellow, and a Co-Convener of the Program in law and Social Science at Texas A&M University School of Law, where he teaches professional responsibility, business associations, international business transactions, and a business law seminar. Professor Markovic’s research focuses on the duties of lawyers and judges in transnational contexts, the regulation of legal markets, and access to justice. He also writes about the the use of artificial intelligence in the legal profession.
Prior to joining Texas A&M, Professor Markovic practiced law in New York City with Sidley Austin LLP and Baker Hostetler LLP and clerked for the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Court in the Hague, Netherlands. He is a graduate of Columbia
University, New York University, and Georgetown University Law Center.
From 2000 to early 2023, Julie Mathews served as Executive Director of CLEO (Community Legal Education Ontario), an Ontario-based community legal clinic that specializes in public legal education and information. Julie led CLEO in carrying out a range of innovative initiatives, including the collaborative Steps to Justice/ Justice pas-à-pas websites and CLEO’s Guided Pathways. She was honoured in 2016 with the Law Foundation of Ontario’s Guthrie award for her contribution to access to justice and excellence in the legal profession.
During her last years at CLEO, Julie began to conduct research with Professor David Wiseman at the uOttawa Faculty of Law on the role of community workers in supporting people with law-related problems. Julie and David have produced several reports on this topic, including Shifting the Paradigm: Exploring Opportunities for Community Justice Help, and continue to work in this research area. Julie also assists organizations and people interested in advancing meaningful access to justice through public legal education.
Hugh previously worked at the Law and Justice Foundation of NSW, on several landmark access to justice and legal need projects. Throughout his career, he has worked closely with legal aid commissions, community legal centres, state and federal governments, giving him a deep understanding of legal institutions and access to justice issues throughout Australia. In his work at the Victoria Law Foundation, Hugh is an author of the Public Understanding of Law Survey reports, the Civil Justice Data Mapping Project reports and continues to lead important empirical research into legal need and capability in Victoria.
Tania McKenna is the Partnerships & Community Development Manager at Northern Community Legal Centre. Her 25 years of experience working across the community legal and family violence sectors has included policy and development lead roles. She has led numerous initiatives to improve access to justice including research into legal need and systemic barriers; advocacy for policy and law reform; and piloting and evaluating service design reforms.
Professor McMahon holds a BA in history from Huron University College at Western University and an MA in history from the University of Toronto. She was awarded a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship for her work on how protest movements influenced Canada’s nuclear policy from 1957 to 1963, the subject of her PhD in Canadian diplomatic and political history from the University of Toronto. This was followed by an LLB (with honours) from the University of Toronto, where she served as co-editor-in-chief of the University of Toronto Faculty of Law Review and received the Dean Cecil A. Wright Key. Following a clerkship with the Honorable Justice Ian Binnie at the Supreme Court of Canada, she attended Yale Law School as a Fulbright Fellow, where she completed an LLM and JSD. Her dissertation dealt with the influence of law reform movements on the procedural fusion of law and equity in Victorian England, which led to the Judicature Acts and modern conceptions of civil procedure.
Professor McMahon has published widely in her fields of study, including two books. The Persons Case: The Origins and Legacy of the Fight for Legal Personhood (with Robert J. Sharpe) was published jointly by the University of Toronto Press and Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History in 2007. The book was the members’ selection for that year, won the Canadian Law and Society Association Book Prize and was short-listed for the John Wesley Dafoe Book Prize. Essence of Indecision: Diefenbaker’s Nuclear Policy 1957-1963 was published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2009 and is considered the leading text on the topic.
Professor Janet Mosher’s research focuses on law and gender-based violence, access to justice for marginalized populations, welfare policy (the intersections of poverty and gender-based violence in particular), women’s homelessness, and legal aid. They have been co-investigators, along with other colleagues, on a multi-year research project exploring the access to justice barriers experienced by survivors of intimate partner violence when they must navigate multiple legal systems (family, criminal, child welfare and immigration among them).
Andrew Pilliar is an Associate Professor at the Thompson Rivers University Faculty of Law in Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada. His research focusses on the demand for and supply of legal services, the self-represented litigant phenomenon, and how vulnerability theory can inform access to justice research. He has law degrees from the University of Toronto and the University of British Columbia, and has been visiting faculty at Central European University and the University of Otago.
Chris has worked for 20 years with and for communities facing human rights issues, including people experiencing or at risk of homelessness and mental health issues. Under his leadership, Justice Connect launched a strategy to better equip the organisation to tackle compounding challenges and crises, reinforcing a responsive approach to legal need, and a commitment to using digital strategies to scale our services.
He has worked in casework, policy, and leadership roles with Tenants Victoria, Victoria Legal Aid, Consumer Action Law Centre, the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission, and Justice Connect.
Through these roles Chris has seen first-hand the impact of innovative and data-driven tools and services to connect people with help and make systemic changes to progress social justice.
Chris has served on the Boards of the Victorian Federation of Community Legal Centres and the Council to Homeless Persons. He is currently on the Boards of the Australian Pro Bono Centre and the Human Rights Law Centre, and Chairs the NSW Legal Assistance Forum. In 2022 Chris was selected for the prestigious Social Impact Leadership Australia program, and in 2010, travelled the world as a Churchill Fellow to investigate programs that stop homelessness before it starts.
Paul Prettitore is a Senior Specialist at The World Bank, where he has worked on issues of good governance, justice sector reform and land governance, and developed research on access to justice and poverty. Paul is also currently a Visiting Scholar at the Law Faculty of Queen’s University Belfast where he focuses on research on the distribution of justice and on conflict land markets.
Issy chose a career in the law hoping she could make a difference in her community. She is dedicated to her clients, ensuring their voices are heard and respected. Outside of legal practice, Issy has an undergraduate degree in Environmental Policy and Management and has volunteered with numerous organisations working to achieve sustainable development in South Australia.
Rebecca Robichaud is Director of Experiential Education and Pro Bono Initiatives, and an assistant professor (clinical). Prior to her current appointment she served as the Director of Externships. Professor Robichaud co-founded the Warrior Housing Corps in response to the U.S. Attorney General’s call for law schools to engage in addressing the eviction crisis in the U.S. She taught the Community Advocacy Clinic in three different semesters, with the focus ranging from local government transparency issues to fair, affordable, safe housing issues.
Miriam (she/her) is the lead of the Your Way Forward program which brings together nine legal clinic partners across Ontario, Canada and provides holistic legal advice and support to people who have experienced sexual violence and intimate partner violence. Using a community-based, collaborative model, Your Way Forward seeks to increase access to just outcomes for survivors of gender-based violence, through direct client services and advocating for much-needed systemic change. Before focusing on working with organizations who are committed to creating trauma-informed legal options for survivors, Miriam practiced criminal defence.
Tanina Rostain is the Agnes Williams Sesquicentennial Professor of Justice Innovation at Georgetown Law Center. Her scholarship focuses on access to justice, the American legal profession, and legal ethics. Current projects explore innovative approaches to improving the transparency, equity, and accessibility of the civil justice system, including through the use of digital technologies, non-lawyer service delivery models, and court modernization. At Georgetown, Tanina launched the Justice Lab, a research center dedicated to investigating new modalities to address people’s everyday justice problems. Professor Rostain co-leads the Georgetown Civil Justice Data Commons, a secure court data repository created to facilitate research on evictions and debt collection cases. She is also the lead PI and Faculty Director of the Justice Innovation Fellows Program and the South Carolina Justice Navigators Network, both housed at the Georgetown Institute for Technology Law and Policy.
Tanina’s earlier work explored the ethical challenges that arise in corporate and tax practice and the organizational factors that lead to professional misconduct. In 2014, she published Confidence Games: Lawyers, Accountants, and the Tax Shelter Industry (co-authored with Professor Milton C. Regan Jr.), which examined the role of tax professionals in the rise of the tax shelter industry.
Georgina has a PhD in Legal History from Monash University (Melbourne) and has a history of quantitative and qualitative research, which includes working as a Senior Analyst for the Victorian Parliamentary Budget Office and several leading Australian universities. Her work has been published in the International Journal for Crime, Justice, and Social Democracy, and other journals. In her work at the Victoria Law Foundation, Georgina co-leads the Measure for Measure: Tailoring Everyday Justice project and continues to contribute important empirical research into legal need and capability in Victoria.
Kathryn A. Sabbeth is the Judge Warren J. Ferguson Scholar and a professor of law at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. She teaches, writes, and litigates about civil (in)justice and housing. Recent publications include Eviction Courts; Racial Capitalism in the Civil Courts; and The Gender of Gideon. Her shorter commentary, such as Market-Based Law Development and Erasing the “Scarlet E” of Eviction Records, has appeared in the Appeal, the Law and Political Economy Blog, and the Washington Post. Kathryn is currently writing her first book, Courts & Capital: How Market Power Shapes Law and Justice in the Civil Legal System, under contract with Cambridge University Press. Before joining the faculty at Rutgers, Kathryn taught at the University of North Carolina, where she directed a clinic that represented tenants and workers in housing and employment litigation. Prior to that, she supervised students on federal civil rights litigation as a clinical teaching fellow at Georgetown University Law Center. Before entering academia, she served as a staff attorney in the Housing Unit of (what was then) South Brooklyn Legal Services, and clerked in the Southern District of New York and at the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Dr. Ryan Sakoda is an Associate Professor at the University of Iowa College of Law. His teaching and research focus on the empirical analysis of crime and criminal justice policy. Professor Sakoda joined the Iowa faculty after a fellowship at the University of Chicago Law School and working as a staff attorney and Liman Fellow at Boston’s public defender office. He received his BA from University of California at Berkeley, his MSC at the London School of Economics, his JD from Yale Law School, and his PhD in economics from Harvard.
Azamat Salaev rule of law, court administration and access to justice specialist. currently working as project manager of the ‘Strengthening the rule of law and human rights protection in Uzbekistan’ project of the UNDP in Uzbekistan.
Rebecca L. Sandefur is Professor in and Director of the Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics at Arizona State University. She investigates access to civil justice from every angle — from how legal services are delivered and consumed, to how civil legal aid is organized around the nation, to the role of pro bono, to the relative efficacy of lawyers, nonlawyers and digital tools as advisers and representatives, to how ordinary people think about their justice problems and try to resolve them. In addition to her appointment at ASU, Sandefur is Faculty Fellow at the American Bar Foundation, where she founded and leads the Access to Justice Research Initiative.
Dr. Joaquín Santuber is Assistant Professor of Law and Technology at the Faculty of Law, Universidad de Los Andes, Colombia. He has been a postdoctoral researcher on the topic of designing for posthuman legalities—human-nature-machine relations at the Center for Advanced De-sign Studies, Palo Alto, USA. He obtained a Ph.D. in Design in IT Systems and Technologies at the Hasso-Plattner-Institute, Germany. His doctoral studies focused on designing for digital justice, studying innovation, law, and technologies in Chilean courts.
Noel Semple holds the rank of Associate Professor at the University of Windsor Faculty of Law.
He studies access to justice; his work asks how the law and legal institutions work in real life. It also aspires to improve the ability of law and legal institutions to actually create justice. Empirical research and policy analysis are key tools in Noel’s scholarship.
Noel teaches and writes in the fields of civil dispute resolution, legal ethics and professionalism, legal services regulation, and family law. He directs the Windsor Legal Practice Simulation, a week-long legal practice simulation in which all Windsor Law 1L students participate.
He has received the Windsor Student Law Society Faculty Award for teaching, as well as the OBA Foundation Award and others. He is Editor-in-chief of Civil Procedure and Practice in Ontario. This leading guide to Ontario civil procedure written by a team of over 130 lawyers. It is published and available without charge on CanLii.
Noel’s book Accessibility, Quality, and Profitability for Personal Plight Law Firms: Hitting the Sweet Spot is available free from the Canadian Bar Association. His book Legal Services Regulation at the Crossroads: Justitia’s Legions is available from Edward Elgar Press
Tess Sheldon is the Clinic Director of the Health Justice Program in Mental Health and Addictions. She joined the University of Windsor’s Faculty of Law in 2018 as an Assistant Professor. She writes, presents and teaches extensively on a variety of mental health, access to justice, disability and human rights topics. Dr. Sheldon’s research, including about coercive medication administration practices in psychiatric settings, scrutinizes the role of law to protect and promote our communities’ health. She explores the law’s possibilities (and perils) to confront the regimes that reflect and reinforce economic and social exclusion of persons with disabilities and consumers/ survivors of the psychiatric system.
Amy worked alongside the Caregivers’ Action Centre, advocating for changes to the former Live-In Caregiver Program through public action and civil litigation. Maria is experienced assisting temporary foreign workers and recent immigrants injured in Canada, including Caregivers. Amy Slotek is the Staff Lawyer and Program Lead of the Embedded Counsel Program at Sound Times. Amy has a diverse work experience in the legal and advocacy field. Amy began their career as an Instructor at Community Living Toronto from 2001 to 2003. Amy then worked as a Legal Advisor at the Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly Refugee Advocacy and Support Program from 2004 to 2008. Amy then joined the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe as a Programme Officer and Consultant from 2011 to 2012. Amy then worked as an Articling Fellow at the Canadian Civil Liberties Association from 2012 to 2013. Amy continued their work at the Canadian Civil Liberties Association as Counsel – Inquest into the Death of Ashley Smith from 2013 to 2013. In 2015, Amy joined Legal Aid Ontario as a Staff Lawyer, where they designed and implemented legal service delivery models and practiced law in various areas. Amy also served as the Project Lead for the innovative ‘Justice in Time’ project, providing legal support to homeless clients with mental health disabilities. Throughout their career, Amy has demonstrated a commitment to advocacy and social justice.
Laura Snowdon is Counsel at the Law Commission of Ontario, where she is leading a law reform project on improving protection orders to better prevent intimate partner and family violence. She recently served as Commission Counsel to the Mass Casualty Commission, a public inquiry created to examine the April 18-19, 2020 mass casualty in Nova Scotia and to provide recommendations to make communities safer.
Laura holds an LLM in International Legal Studies from New York University. She has worked to safeguard human rights in Canada and internationally, particularly for individuals and communities affected by conflict and violence, at humanitarian and international organizations (the International Committee of the Red Cross and the International Labour Organization), and non-profit organizations (The Lawyering Project and the Ghana Center for Democratic Development). Laura also has experience as a civil litigator in cases of sexual assault and athlete abuse. She clerked for Justice Abella at the Supreme Court of Canada, and Chief Justice Strathy and Justice Watt at the Ontario Court of Appeal.
Jennie Stone (Hons. BA 1995, MSc 1998, JD 2005) is the Executive Director of Neighbourhood Legal Services and Manager of the Health Justice Program. She was NLS’ staff immigration lawyer from 2011-2018. Prior to joining NLS she co-founded the Hong Kong Refugee Advice Centre (now Justice Centre HK) which advocates for the rights of refugee claimants and other migrants in the HKSAR. Until November 2018 she spent 4 years on the Executive Committee of the Canadian Council for Refugees (CCR). She is currently the co-chair of the CCR’s Legal Affairs Committee.
Lauren Sudeall holds the David Daniels Allen Distinguished Chair of Law at Vanderbilt Law School where she also serves as director of the Vanderbilt Access to Justice (AtJ) Initiative. Her research focuses on access to the courts, both civil and criminal, and how lower-income individuals engage with the legal system, either with a lawyer or on their own.
Before joining the academy, Sudeall clerked for Judge Stephen Reinhardt on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and Justice John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court of the United States. She then worked at the Southern Center for Human Rights, where she represented indigent capital clients in Alabama and Georgia and litigated civil claims regarding the right to counsel.
Sudeall is a member of the American Law Institute and currently serves as an Associate Reporter for Principles of the Law, High-Volume Civil Adjudication. She has also served on the Southern Center’s board of directors, the ABA Standing Committee on Legal Aid & Indigent Defendants, and as chair of the AALS Section on Constitutional Law.
Sudeall graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School and received her B.A. with distinction from Yale University.
Emily Taylor Poppe is Professor of Law and (by courtesy) Sociology at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. She is also the Faculty Director of the UCI Law Initiative for Inclusive Civil Justice and an affiliate of the Center for Empirical Research on the Legal Profession. An interdisciplinary empirical scholar, her research is focused on inequalities in access to civil justice. She has investigated variation in both formal and informal access to legal counsel and the effect of legal representation on case outcomes. In other scholarship, she has evaluated how legal education, the regulation of the legal profession, legal technology, and institutional design might enhance access to justice. Finally, in a third stream of scholarship, she evaluates estates and trusts law from an access to justice perspective.
Nye Thomas is the Executive Director of the Law Commission of Ontario (LCO), Ontario’s leading law reform agency.
Nye expertise includes access to justice, law reform, legal needs, justice system policy development, the impact of technology on legal rights, and legal services for low-income communities. As Executive Director of the LCO, Nye is responsible producing independent, multidisciplinary, and evidence-based analysis and recommendations on complex law reform issues.
Arizona Court of Appeals Judge. Chair, Arizona Commission on Access to Justice; Co-Chair, Arizona’s Plan B Workgroup. Sam is on the National Judicial College Board of Trustees; Secretary of the Uniform Law Commission; ABA Presidential appointee to the Standing Committee on Lawyer Referral and Information Services and the Task Force on Law and Artificial Intelligence; and Advisor to the American Law Institute’s RESTATEMENT OF THE LAW (THIRD) OF TORTS: REMEDIES. In 2023, he received the James A. Walsh Outstanding Jurist Award from the State Bar of Arizona. In 2021, he was named the Judge of the Year by the Arizona Supreme Court.
Sam has presented more than 500 law-related programs and published nearly 90 law-related articles, including 16 law review articles. Judge Maricopa County Superior Court for five years; partner at Perkins Coie Brown & Bain, P.A., Phoenix, and associate Arnold & Porter, Washington, D.C. He clerked for Arizona Supreme Court Chief Justice Stanley Feldman and Federal Judge David Hansen, Northern District of Iowa. Sam received an M.J.S., Duke University School of Law (2020); J.D., University of Iowa College of Law (1988), and B.S., Iowa State University (1984).
The Honourable Michael H. Tulloch was appointed a judge of the Superior Court of Justice for Ontario in 2003. He was elevated to the Court of Appeal for Ontario in 2012. Prior to his appointment to the bench, Chief Justice Tulloch had served as an assistant Crown Attorney in Peel and Toronto from 1991 to 1995 before entering private practice, where he specialized in criminal law.
In 2016, Chief Justice Tulloch was appointed by the Ontario government to conduct important reviews which resulted in two extensive reports: the Report of the Independent Police Oversight Review (2017) and the Report of the Independent Street Checks Review (2018). He served on the Government Response Team for the Commission on Systemic Racism while working as a Crown Attorney. He was chair of a review panel on Osgoode Hall Law School’s admissions policy in 2006.
Chief Justice Tulloch served as a member of the Ontario Superior Court Education Committee, the National Judicial Institute, and the Commissioner’s Judicial Advisory Committee on International Engagement. He was a Distinguished Fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto and a Distinguished Research Fellow in the Centre of Law and Policy at Ryerson University (now Toronto Metropolitan University). He was a founding member and a patron of the Second Chance Scholarship Foundation and Chair of the Advisory Board to the Black Business and Professional Association. He has been a frequent speaker in various post-secondary institutions as well as professional and community forums.
Chief Justice Tulloch was born in Jamaica. He holds a B.A. from York University and a LL.B. from Osgoode Hall Law School. He has also received honourary Doctor of Laws degrees from the Toronto Metropolitan University, the University of Guelph, and the Law Society of Ontario, as well as an honourary Doctor of Divinity degree from Tyndale University and Seminary. He was admitted to the Bar of Ontario in 1991.
Erin Turner is the CEO of the Consumer Policy Research Centre (CPRC), an independent, not-for-profit research institute in Australia. CPRC is one of the few think tanks in the world dedicated to undertaking research to understand consumer perspectives on market problems. CPRC collaborates with academic, not-for-profit, and regulatory bodies to undertake research into emerging problems using a range of qualitative and quantitative methods.
Erin has a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Politics and Public Policy. Erin is a graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors and is a board member of the ombudsman scheme Australian Financial Complaints Authority (AFCA) and ARC Justice, the community legal centre servicing Central and Northern Victoria. She was previously the Director of campaigns at the national consumer advocacy organisation, CHOICE, and the Chair of the Financial Rights Legal Centre, a community legal centre that specialises in assisting on insurance and credit problems.
Juliet-Nil Uraz is a PhD candidate at the London School of Economics and a Visiting Research Fellow at Opportunity Insights at Harvard University. Her research lies at the intersection of public economics and empirical legal studies. She is especially interested in uncovering the impacts of access to legal assistance on benefits take-up, poverty alleviation and economic inequalities. In her PhD, she studies the effects of a civil legal aid reform in the UK, and the introduction of right-to-counsel programs in the US. She is a collaborator of the Justice Data Observatory, an ABF/JPB Access to Justice Early Career Scholar, a Senior Researcher for Policy in Practice and for the UK All-Party Parliamentary Group on Access to Justice.
Patricia Vagg is a PhD candidate with the Australian Centre for Agriculture and Law at the University of New England (UNE) in regional New South Wales, Australia. The AgLaw Centre provides innovative scholarship on laws and institutions affecting rural communities, to develop policies and strategies that improve rural sustainability and social justice. Patricia has a particular interest in equity of access to education, health and legal services in regional, rural, remote and very remote (RRRR) places.
Patricia is a solicitor in regional NSW, and a sessional academic in regional universities. During her time in private legal practice, she has been acknowledged for her work for disadvantaged clients in remote NSW. Patricia was the 2023 and the 2022 winner of UNE Law School’s 3MT Three Minute Thesis competition. Her contributions to social justice and to regional communities also include being a member of UNE’s Academic Board Research Committee, and a former member of the NSW Law Society’s Rural Issues Committee.
Eliza is a gender-based violence researcher at Monash University with a particular interest in economic precarity. Eliza’s PhD is the first study to explore problems with domestic energy services from victim-survivor perspectives and investigate how energy utilities might better support customers affected by family violence.
Eliza’s research is animated by creating space for victim-survivor voices to drive change, as well as working closely with industry and its regulators to effect change in practice. Outside her research, Eliza has worked with the Victorian Essential Services Commission and the Monash Gender and Family Violence Prevention Centre to improve access to safe and effective assistance for victim-survivors of family violence in Victoria.
CEO South-East Monash Legal Service
Kris commenced law in private practice for a few years before moving to the legal aid assistance sector in Australia. Kris has worked across a Legal Aid Commission, Aboriginal Legal Service and Community Legal Centres in Western Australia, Northern Territory and Victoria over the last 20 plus year. Kris has a very strong commitment to both the practice of law for social justice outcomes but also the use of community development frameworks to build capacity and capability in all communities to navigate their right and responsibilities in the justice system.
Erin Weaver is the Post-graduate Fellow at Innovation for Justice housed at the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law and University of Utah David Eccles School of Business. Erin earned a BA in psychology from Loras College, an MA in forensic psychology from the University of Denver Graduate School of Professional Psychology, and a JD from the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law. In her free time, Erin enjoys spending time with her partner, going hiking, spending time with friends, family, and pets, and traveling.
Amy Widman is a Professor at Rutgers Law School where she teaches administrative law and torts. Her research focuses on increasing access to justice in administrative decision-making processes at the federal, state, and local levels. She has recently written on what administrative law can learn from the access to justice movement generally, the role of state ALJs in increasing access to justice in their hearing rooms, and best practices for federal agencies to identify and reduce burdens on the public. As a research consultant with the Administrative Conference of the United States, she is currently studying models for nonlawyer representation and assistance in federal agency decision-making processes. As an ABF Access to Justice Scholar, she is also studying features of local agency decision-making that can inform expansion of representation. She received a B.A. from Northwestern University and a J.D. from New York University School of Law.
David Wiseman is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa whose academic activity focuses on access to justice.
Kathryne M. Young, JD, PhD, is Associate Professor of Law at the George Washington University in Washington, DC. Her research focuses on access to justice from the perspective of ordinary people. With support from the National Science Foundation and the American Bar Foundation, she designed and administered the Survey of Everyday American Legality (SEAL), which examines the variety of ways people think about and navigate access to justice problems. Young’s research has been published in the Harvard Law Review, California Law Review, Law & Society Review, Social Forces, and numerous other law reviews and peer-reviewed journals. kathrynemyoung.com.
As the Deputy Managing Director of NCSC’s Access to Justice team, Zach is working on national level initiatives to increase access to justice, including working with various court systems to improve the experience of self-represented litigants through process improvement, technological innovation and system change. At NCSC, Zach is the co-creator and a co-host of Tiny Chats—offering free, digestible and creative short-form educational videos on topics about access to justice. He was also instrumental in securing $11 million in funding to support the Eviction Diversion Initiative and in its design, staffs the CCJ/COSCA Policy Committee and has authored numerous reports and resources on access to justice topics, including several interactive tools.
Prior to joining NCSC, Zach was the Program Director at the Illinois Equal Justice Foundation, where he ran the statewide grantmaking and program evaluation of legal aid organizations and was responsible for the development and management of the Illinois Armed Forces Legal Aid Network.