Envisioning a People-Centered Access to Justice Research and Data Agenda
By Adrian Di Giovanni and Matthew Burnett
February 2024
This article was originally published by Law360 Canada (www.law360.ca), part of LexisNexis Canada Inc.
In the words of Hon. Justice Andromache Karakatsanis, Chair of the Action Committee on Access to Justice in Civil and Family Matters, “Good data and information are essential … the first step in removing the barriers to effective dispute resolution and remodeling the justice system as a people-centred institution.”
The past two decades have seen a small revolution in data on people’s legal needs, including a focus on population surveys where ordinary people are asked about their experiences with events in their lives that are “justiciable,” or have the potential to raise legal issues. Thanks to these legal needs surveys, we know that over half of the world’s population lacks meaningful access to justice. In every country where legal needs have been studied, we know that these problems fall disproportionately on low-income and minority communities and exacerbate other challenges related to health, education, and livelihoods. We also know that effectively responding to legal needs by ensuring meaningful access to justice is critical for human flourishing, for democracy to function, and for the rule of law to have meaning. At a more fundamental level, we have learned that in most contexts the majority of people don’t understand their life problems to be legal problems, and that the vast majority those legal problems never find their way to lawyers and courts.
In 2015, the global community adopted the Sustainable Development Goals, which include a global commitment to achieve access to justice for all by 2030 (SDG 16.3). That commitment has helped spur some of the efforts to understand people’s legal needs in countries around the world, including highlighting an enormous global justice gap. It has also catalyzed greater coordination among countries and a range of stakeholders – for instance, through the recent Justice Action Coalition and ongoing work of the OECD’s Roundtables on Access to Justice. However, despite this flurry of promising activity, huge gaps remain in the evidence needed to make ‘justice for all’ a reality.
Unlike other core areas of human need – for example, public health and education – we know very little about how to best respond to the extraordinary scale at which ordinary people around the world experience unresolved legal needs. For generations we have largely been flying blind. Emerging evidence on people’s justice needs has provided a critical first step. Equally pressing, however, is the need for a rigorous, evidence-based understanding of how to ensure effective, scalable, and sustainable policies and programs to meet those basic justice needs. To achieve this, we suggest three opportunities for action:
Developing a shared research and data agenda, so that we’re working towards the same goals rather than in silos. Efforts to generate evidence in one part of the world should be available to, and help to inform, policy and practice in others.
Investments in generating new evidence about people’s justice problems and how to best address them, so that we are not operating in the dark.
Better dissemination and engagement to ensure that new data and evidence about how to achieve justice for all lands in the hands (and minds) of public decision-makers and translates into effective policy and practice.
Against this backdrop, the American Bar Foundation in collaboration with Canada’s International Development Research Centre, the World Bank, and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has launched the Justice Data Observatory (JDO), which aims to build and shape an agenda for sustained, policy-relevant evidence and research on access to justice as a global field. A particular focus is to build understanding and global evidence for how people-centered access to justice can combat poverty and inequality, promote inclusive development and growth, and empower democratic participation and governance.
Over the past year, the JDO has been convening groups of researchers, policymakers, and practitioners across low-, middle-, and high-income countries, with a view to developing a set of core, shared research questions on access to justice globally. The JDO’s longer term plans are to support the production and dissemination of original access to justice research and sources of data related to shared research questions; and advocating for evidence-based approaches to access to justice policy and practice.
As an initial step, the JDO conducted a meta-research project led by Professor Rebecca Sandefur to review existing research and evidence globally. The results of that review, which are fresh out in the JDO’s first report, People-Centered Access to Justice Research: A Global Perspective, calls for three kinds of knowledge and data, to underpin a global research agenda on access to justice. The first is knowledge and data that demonstrates why people-centered justice matters. The second is knowledge and data linking people-centered justice to material policy outcomes, like poverty reduction, inclusive growth, and democratic empowerment. A final area of research need is evidence and data to guide implementation, including the effectiveness of new and existing programs and justice reforms.
The next phase of the project will explore specific country and regional contexts in greater depth, with a particular focus on the Global South, to refine the emerging research agenda and data needs. We will also continue efforts to convene representatives from a range of countries, international organizations, and justice experts to build ownership in the agenda and identify how to promote greater prioritization and investment in access to justice research and evidence.
As part of JDO’s convening efforts, this past November we participated in the annual Summit of the Action Committee. The Action Committee recently celebrated the 10th anniversary of its seminal report, A Roadmap for Change, in 2023. The Action Committee embodies the type of ongoing coordination, exchange, and collaboration that we see as needed across the sector at a national and global level to achieve justice for all. While so much more is needed to improve access to justice in countries around the world – whether in terms of better evidence, investment, or action – there are important glimmers of hope. For instance, the Action Committee’s Justice Development Goals, and efforts to collect data over a sustained period are extremely fertile ground for deepening understanding on how to bridge the justice gap in Canada, across a diverse mix of jurisdictions and institutional realities in different regions of the country. A similar effort is underway in the US, where the National Science Foundation has recently funded a project to convene access to justice researchers and federal agencies to develop shared research agendas and better utilize federal data. It’s exactly these kinds of collaborations and partnerships, both within national contexts and globally, that present a critical opportunity to support and sustain actionable evidence towards SDG 16.3’s commitment to justice for all.