Addressing the Access to Justice Crisis: Think Systemically, Act Locally
Nikole Nelson
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Community Justice Workers: Part of the Solution to Alaska’s Legal Deserts
Joy Anderson, Sarah Carver & Dr. Robert Onders
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Legal deserts—large geographic areas where there are few or no attorneys—are found throughout the United States, including Alaska. These deserts are a major contributor to the access to justice gap. Further compounding the scarcity of legal resources in these areas, many people living in legal deserts cannot afford legal help, even when a lawyer is available. Legal aid organizations have struggled to overcome these challenges in meeting the legal needs of low-income Americans and are often forced to turn away as many people as they are able to help. Alaska Legal Services Corporation (ALSC) is responding to this challenge in part through a new type of legal professional: the community justice worker. Inspired by the Alaska Native Tribal health care system, community justice workers are non-attorneys trained to offer specific legal interventions for a particular legal issue. During Alaska’s recent Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) crisis, community justice worker volunteers helped ALSC meet an exponential increase in SNAP delay and denial cases and successfully recovered $1.43 million in food security benefits on behalf of clients. ALSC looks to continue expanding its successful community justice worker program to meet the legal needs of low-income Alaskans.
Building Successful Justice Worker Programs: Emerging Insights from Research and Practice
Rebecca L. Sandefur & Matthew Burnett
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America’s deep access to justice crisis has long seemed intractable. But new and potentially transformative models for giving people access to legal services and to their own law are emerging around the country. Among the most promising of these are community justice workers. These are people already trusted in their communities, such as social workers, librarians, health aides, community leaders, teachers, mediators, and everyday citizens who are trained to help people understand and act on the legal challenges involved in critical life issues. These issues implicate basic needs like nutrition, health, income security, shelter, education, and care of dependents, and affect millions of Americans each year. As jurisdictions around the country explore justice workers as a potential solution, we offer ten essential insights for successful programs, reflecting discoveries from a growing body of social scientific research. This work gives useful guidance about how people understand and use law, informing the design of more accessible and effective services. It also teaches about what works in making justice workers effective at helping people with legal issues and with connecting to their own law, sustainable for both the people who work in these roles and the communities they serve, and capable of scaling up to meet the country’s currently vast unmet legal needs.
Justice Beyond the State
Kirsten Matoy Carlson
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For decades the intersectionality of extreme rurality and cultural difference has led scholars and tribal leaders to advocate for recognition of local authority as a solution to the justice gap in rural Alaska. Local control often means developing courts in and extending jurisdiction to Alaska Native villages. This Article evaluates strengthening tribal courts or justice systems through restorations of jurisdiction as a way to address access to justice issues in Alaska Native villages. It argues that restorations of jurisdiction and the development of tribal justice systems must ensure that Alaska Natives define the justice provided in their communities. Restorations of jurisdiction that require Alaska Native villages to replace their traditions and laws with adversarial processes and values threaten to undermine access to justice.
Next Steps in Online Courts: Accelerating Access to Justice Through Court Technology
J.J. Prescott
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For more than a decade, state courts have been expanding access to justice by adopting online dispute resolution (ODR) platforms and other outward-facing communication technologies. At a deep level, these reforms aim at improving society by bolstering the rule of law. At a surface level, these innovations recognize that the justice system works better when courts and law are easier and less costly to understand and use. In important respects, these efforts have been a success. The accessibility of many state courts is considerably more robust today than it was ten years ago, at least for small-stakes cases, like traffic disputes and small claims lawsuits. Yet the pace of innovation—at least in the eyes of some—has been sluggish and episodic. Courts to date have stuck to the comfortable shallows with their ideas, designing technology, for example, to facilitate private dispute resolution rather than incorporating technology into the adjudication process itself. In this article, I argue that state courts are beginning to swim beyond the breakers, and I offer Alaska as a case in point. Building on its years of experience using technology to mitigate unique geographic and demographic barriers and armed with the lessons on display in other states, Alaska is innovating. It is still early, and Alaska’s approach to ODR has important limitations. Nevertheless, the state’s vision for its courts crosses new waters not only by soon making formal adjudication more accessible through asynchronous text-based proceedings but also by incorporating simple, thoughtful refinements to existing designs and by creating opportunities to leverage out-of-state resources.
Power-Conscious Legal Work: Building a Roadmap for Rural Access to Justice Through Trust, Accountability, & Trauma-Informed Practices
Cayley Balser & Antonio M. Coronado
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The importance of trauma-informed practices has never been greater. In the United States, most of the population has experienced at least one traumatic event in their life. Experiencing a traumatic event may have long-lasting impacts on physical health, including disruption to all major system functioning. Mental health impacts may include behavior changes, memory challenges, inability to complete routine tasks, difficulty with interpersonal relationships, and other symptoms associated with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Extant literature examines the association between past trauma experiences and later interactions with the civil justice system, including litigant conceptualizations of legal system engagement as a traumatic event in and of itself. While the prevalence of traumatic experiences is staggering, there are practices that legal service providers can implement to mitigate the effects of trauma and the risk of retraumatization. Additionally, these trauma-informed and trauma-responsive practices have been shown to help lessen the effects that “trauma exposure response”—the impact from working with those in trauma—have on the practitioner.
A unique reality of service provision in legal vacuums is the dual geographic and social proximity of providers to the communities that they serve. We intentionally use the term legal vacuum in lieu of legal desert because “desert” connotes a naturally occurring environment, whereas absence of legal help should not be considered natural. This is true for service providers in both rural areas, generally, and in large states with remote areas, in particular. Scholarship-activism at this intersection of human need and legal power emphasizes the importance of place-conscious advocacy that centers rural communities’ understandings of and existing practices for problem-resolution; as rural communities know well, rural needs require rural- and community-responsive services. In recognition of the convergent ways that trauma, legal vacuums, and community harm are replicated by place-based forms of power, this piece provides a roadmap for advancing “power-conscious legal work,” or legal problem-solving that is grounded in linked values of trust, community accountability, and trauma-informed practices.
In examining the intersecting harms that are navigated by legal practitioners, we can understand trauma-informed practices and place-based notions of accountability as service benefits—not labor burdens—to the work of all service providers. By centering rural, Native, and historically marginalized notions of power, this Article looks to Alaska as a source for deep reflection on how the U.S. legal profession might advance access to justice for rural communities through concrete forms of power- and place-conscious work. Reflecting on our own work to advance community-accountable legal empowerment initiatives, we join fellow innovators in reimagining the place and potential of justice-making everywhere.
Glacial Progress: Thawing the Path to a Law School in Alaska
Kathrine Coonjohn
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My contribution to this symposium is clear: to advocate for the establishment of an Alaskan law school. As the only state in the nation without one Alaska keenly suffers the repercussions of this absence. The resulting void creates shortages of legal professionals, reduces opportunities for continuing legal education, cultural and community disconnection, and contributes to brain drain. Further, it undermines the state’s legal infrastructure and limits access to justice. Despite significant logistical and financial hurdles, including the high costs of establishment and sustainability concerns, the need for a local legal institution is undeniable, and this need will only grow more acute. In this paper, I explore the history of efforts to establish an Alaskan law school, then advance to an evaluation of the broad spectrum of legal needs in Alaska, before concluding that the absence of a law school affects the administration of justice through a forced reliance on foreign legal education institutions that disadvantages Alaskans. Following that, I address counterarguments and recommend proceeding with a feasibility study. Finally, I advocate a strategic path forward, focusing on methods to secure funding and accreditation while discussing the impact on interested, affected, and relevant parties.
Alaska’s Healthcare Markets: The Free Market is Not a “Cure”
Katie Raya
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Healthcare reform in the United States requires a nuanced approach to improve quality and access while managing costs—a challenge particularly pronounced in Alaska. Despite being the highest spender on healthcare globally, the U.S. fails to deliver commensurate health outcomes, with Alaska exemplifying these systemic issues. The state faces the highest healthcare costs in the nation yet performs poorly in quality and access metrics. This situation has prompted urgent legislative scrutiny of existing policies, such as the Certificate of Need (CON) Law and the 80th Percentile Rule. This Note critically evaluates the argument that deregulating Alaska’s healthcare market will lead to improved outcomes through increased market competition. Through a comprehensive analysis, it identifies unique factors contributing to Alaska’s healthcare dilemma, including geographical isolation, cultural distinctiveness, and specific budgetary constraints. The Note examines the primary cost drivers and contrasts Alaska’s market with those of other unique states. Ultimately, it argues that simplistic, market-driven solutions are inadequate; instead, legislative efforts should focus on addressing the root causes of high costs to create a more effective healthcare system tailored to Alaska’s specific needs.
Alaska’s Arm-of-the-Tribe Jurisprudence: Ito v. Copper River Native Association and Its Contribution to a More Uniform System of Justice in America
Jack Jeffrey & Erik Gordon
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The Alaska Supreme Court recently overhauled its approach to arm-of-the-tribe sovereign immunity in Ito v. Copper River Native Association. The Court no longer utilizes financial insularity as a dispositive inquiry; instead, the Court has adopted a five-factor test that takes into account (1) the purpose of the entity’s creation, (2) the method of the entity’s creation, (3) the degree of control the tribe maintains over the entity, (4) tribal intent concerning sharing sovereign immunity, and (5) financial relationship. This decision serves as a positive development for two reasons: (1) it is a step towards the elimination of a dual-track justice system and (2) it lessens the undesirable degree of variability in the extension of sovereign immunity to quasi-public entities created by Native tribes and other sovereigns. Alaskan citizens will now be better situated to receive equitable court access regardless of their claim’s jurisdiction and regardless of the sovereign from which the potential immunity extends.
