Oregon Legal Research Blog
‘Jim Greiner Asks “What is Access to Justice For?”’
Direct links to Greiner posts:
Part 1: “What’s access to justice for? Let’s get more philosophical. In a hurry,” by D. James Greiner, 3/23/15, Harvard Law & Policy Review blog.
“…. [T]he first thing I have to do is to ask, “What is this thing for?”. Without deciding first what the purpose of a thing is, there’s no way to know what I should measure to see if that thing is working.
Take legal services to low-income folks. Some lawyers and law students feel a strong desire to provide legal services to the poor. I’m all for it. But unless the only reason we’re providing the services is to make ourselves feel better, we ought to care about whether we’re accomplishing anything by providing the services. And we ought to care about whether there might be a better or more efficient way to accomplish whatever it is that we’re trying to do. That might mean less money for lawyers. But unless the point of legal services to the poor is full(er) employment for lawyers, that shouldn’t bother us too much….
….
If the purpose of providing litigation defense to debt collection defendants is to keep the defendant from having to pay the debt, there’s a far, far, far cheaper way to do that: just buy the debt the plaintiff is suing on. Buy the debt on the open market, and then forgive it by telling the alleged debtor that she’ll never have to pay. You can probably do that for, say, five cents on the dollar….” [Link to full posts from Access to Justice Blog post.]
Part 2: “What’s access to justice for? Let’s get more philosophical. In a hurry. Part II,“ by D. James Greiner, 3/27/15, HL&PR.
Many more intriguing A2J posts and links from Richard Zorza’s Access to Justice Blog.