Legal Knowledge Gardening and Civil Justice Engineering

"At a recent Justice for All event in Massachusetts I suggested that we consider our sprawl of legal help services as an ecosystem. That is, as a complex web of interacting organisms and environments, like a biological system. I showed this high-school-ish picture of a frog pond:...

My slides also included images of a spotty lawn, a wide expanse of green grass, and a verdant garden. Do any of these describe where we are or want to be?

The current civil legal assistance system here and elsewhere is clearly spotty. Barren patches and ‘advice deserts’ abound. Relatively few low-income people receive truly effective help with their essential needs. Legal aid providers and pro bono programs meet about the same small fraction of demand as they did forty years ago. And commercial solutions remain too expensive or otherwise unappealing for most people of modest means. The ‘latent’ market continues to be latent. A lot of legal work that would be useful to have done is not done because it costs more than people are able, or willing, to pay."

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