Conference: Access to Justice Research as a Tool for Advancing Federal Priorities

The United States faces an access to justice crisis of extraordinary scale. It affects every group in society, entrenching poverty and inequality. While all groups in America face civil justice problems, these problems disproportionately impact people of color. Each year, Americans experience 150 million to 250 million new civil justice issues, many involving basic human needs like having a safe place to live, making a dignified living, and caring for those who depend on them. As many as 120 million of those problems go unresolved, with consequences like eviction, homelessness, lost wages and benefits, separated families, and impaired health. These issue areas not only affect core areas of daily life, they are also critical targets of federal decision making. This project is a one-day convening that will bring together researchers working on a range of topic areas in access to civil justice that intersect with critical federal goals, including those relating to housing, veterans’ affairs, immigration, and indigenous access to justice. The convening will connect researchers investigating the role of access to justice in critical policy areas with federal agency actors who can use that knowledge to inform funding priorities and programming. This will help to increase transparency around existing government data and increase utilization of government data by academic researchers. It will create conditions conducive to prioritizing shared goals and connecting them to more robust and collaborative research agendas, helping to develop an active and engaged community of research and practice. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.