Legal self-help is the fastest-growing segment of legal services in the United States, and a significant addition to the repertoire of programs aimed at opening up access to justice in the civil legal system. Few studies, however, have examined how such services work in practice. Through ethnographic research and analysis of meetings between unrepresented litigants and attorneys offering advice in a legal self-help clinic, this article expands the empirical investigation of access to justice to consider what legal self-help looks like in actual practice. In this article, I follow the concept of the “right paper” to analyze the process through which legal self-help litigants develop legal literacy, including the role of lawyers in helping them to do so. The article concludes by discussing what such practices reveal about recent efforts to open up access to justice and also about the dynamics through which people come to think about law and, especially, how to use it.

Public interest law organizations (PILOs) are important institutions for providing access to justice in the United States. How have political, economic, and institutional factors shaped PILOs? How do PILOs vary in the services they offer and in their geographical location relative to poverty and population in the United States? This article investigates these questions by combining original survey data from a representative sample of public interest law organizations with GIS data on population and poverty. We find that the presence of a PILO is positively related to political progressiveness and population at the county level, but negatively related to the concentration of poverty. Our analysis reveals a two-tier system of public interest representation in which national organizations engage in a variety of social change strategies, whereas local and regional organizations utilize more limited strategies and depend more on governmental funding. These patterns have implications for access to justice in the United States today.

Nonlawyer advocates are one proposed solution to the access to justice crisis. Theory and research suggest that nonlawyers might be effective, yet scholars know very little, empirically, about nonlawyer practice in the United States. Using data from more than 5,000 unemployment insurance appeal hearings and interviews with lawyers and nonlawyers who represent employers in these hearings, this article explores how both types of representatives develop expertise and what this means for effectiveness. We find judges play a critical role in shaping nonlawyer legal expertise and nonlawyers develop expertise almost exclusively through “trial and error.” We find evidence that while experienced nonlawyers can help parties through their expertise with common court procedures and basic substantive legal concepts, they are not equipped to challenge judges on contested issues of substantive or procedural law in individual cases, advance novel legal claims, or advocate for law reform on a broader scale. These findings have implications for future access to justice research and interventions.

Substantive justice is often seen as elusive in courts dominated by low-income individuals. Complex court rules, coupled with pervasive lack of counsel, can make it difficult for the traditional adversary process to identify and redress legitimate grievances. This article takes on the social problem of substandard housing and examines whether inquisitorial procedure has the potential to produce accurate outcomes in a tribunal dominated by the unrepresented. Relying on in-court observations of nearly 300 hearings, and a longitudinal review of nearly seventy-five cases, this article surfaces the regularized procedures utilized by a purported “problem-solving” housing court, and theorizes that the inquisitorial features of judicially controlled investigation and enforcement may motivate landlords to repair substantiated housing code violations. This article adds nuance to our understanding of informal justice by identifying the hidden procedural formalisms that may guide alternative decision-making processes. Furthermore, it evaluates the relationship of one iteration of experimental formalism to substantive justice, and suggests that inquisitorial procedures may be correlated with improved accuracy in case outcomes.

When claimants press their claims without counsel, they fail at virtually every stage of civil litigation and overwhelmingly fail to obtain meaningful access to justice. This research program harnesses psychological science to experimentally test a novel hypothesis: mainly, a claimant's pro se status itself sends a signal that biases decision making about the claimant and her claim. We conducted social psychological experiments with the public (N = 157), law students (N = 198), and employment discrimination lawyers (N = 39), holding the quality and merit of a Title VII sex discrimination case constant. In so doing, we examined whether a claimant's pro se status itself shapes stereotypes held about the claimant and biases decision making about settlement awards. These experiments reveal that pro se status influences stereotypes of claimants and settlement awards received. Moreover, the signaling effect of pro se status is exacerbated by socialization in the legal profession. Among law-trained individuals (i.e., law students and lawyers), a claimant's pro se status generates negative stereotypes about the claimant and these negative stereotypes explain the adverse effect of pro se status on decision making about settlement awards.

In common law, trespassers could not sue for injuries. In the early 1870s, however, courts exempted child trespassers injured by industrial machinery from this rule. The development of the hotly contested “attractive nuisance” doctrine illustrates turn-of-the-twentieth-century debates about how to allocate the risk of injury from industrial accidents, which linked responsibility to the capacity to understand danger and to exert self-control. Although at first courts in attractive nuisance cases perceived children as innocent, irrational “butterflies,” they gradually reconceived child plaintiffs to be rational, risk-bearing individuals, a change reflected and accelerated by the Safety First campaign launched by railroad corporations. This reframing of children's ability to bear risk created the standard of the “reasonable child,” which transferred responsibility for industrial accidents to children themselves. Although by the 1930s the attractive nuisance doctrine had been widely accepted, in practice the “reasonable child” standard posed a difficult hurdle for child plaintiffs to overcome.

This article presents findings from ethnographic research in death penalty trials around the United States, focusing on the role of victims and their supporters. Victim impact testimony (VIT) in death penalty sentencing has received intense legal scrutiny during the past thirty years. The ruling jurisprudence allows VIT with the explanation that it deserves parity with testimony about the defendant's background. Drawing on observations and interviews with participants in 15 death penalty trials, I demonstrate that this framing confuses the central role of victim supporters in the courtroom. Victim supporters function as mourners, which grants them a socially elevated position in the courtroom. I argue that the consequences of the institutionalization of VIT can only be understood through this lens.

This article examines the rules and practices of waiting in line as a system of informal order, showing that despite its reputation for drudgery, the queue offers rich insights about social norms and the psychology of cooperation. The article begins by investigating the implicit customs of physical waiting in line, uncovering the surprisingly complex unwritten rules (and exceptions) that give queues stability even in the absence of legal governance or state enforcement. Yet the prevailing norms literature typically explains informal order by reference to close-knit groups that can impose sanctions on violators of extralegal rules. This raises a puzzle: Why do queue norms repeatedly produce informal, yet reliable, order among total strangers unlikely to interact again? This article answers this question by looking to social-psychological research showing that people tend to be strong reciprocators rather than selfish utility maximizers. This model makes sense of both our tendency to defer to line norms as well as the disproportionate sanctions with which defectors from these norms meet.

This essay articulates the contributions of Mitra Sharafi's study of Parsi legal culture to colonial legal studies. Situated at the intersection of the literature on legal pluralism and legal institutions, Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia: Parsi Legal Culture, 1772–1947 (2014) uses a range of new legal sources and case law to recover a remarkable history of collective identity that emerged via the medium and infrastructure of law. The Parsis' active participation in colonial legal institutions not only reshaped their normative worlds but also de-anglicized imperial law.

I focus in this essay on legal issues related to women's rights in the British colonial period that are discussed in Mitra Sharafi's 2014 book, Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia: Parsi Legal Culture, 1772–1947. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, the Parsi leadership actively lobbied for laws related to intestate inheritance, women's property rights, divorce, and child marriage that were consistent with their community's customary values and practices. During the same period, legal reform movements were also underway on behalf of Hindu and Muslim women and, to a lesser extent, Christian women. This essay highlights some of the common themes in those movements and discusses, in particular, the similarities and differences in what was achieved for Parsi women and their Hindu sisters, as they and their respective male leaders traversed the road toward greater gender equality under the law.

This essay on Mitra Sharafi's Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia: Parsi Legal Culture, 1772–1947 (2014) focuses on the relationship between certain minorities and the law of the state. It seeks to expand the discussion found in Sharafi's book in three directions: first, by comparing the attitude of Parsis in South Asia to the law of the state with the attitude of German Jewish immigrants in mandatory Palestine and Israel to state law; second, by asking whether the Parsis' embracing of state law was linked to their economic success; and, finally, by pointing to the nature of law itself as a “minority discourse.”

This essay explores religion's need for law, comparing the story told in Mitra Sharafi's Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia (2014)—about the virtual hijacking of British colonial law to serve the communal religious needs of Parsis in colonial India—to other contexts in which secular and religious legal systems have built symbiotic relationships, including in the United States and Thailand. It concludes by urging a reweaving of religious and legal histories after the critique of secularism and its shadows, separationism, and antinomianism.

This essay considers the legal strategies of comparative communities in South Asian, Middle Eastern, and US history. What does it mean for a particular group to “hijack” a body of law, taking everyone on board to an unwanted destination? The piece compares the legal strategies of the Parsi community in colonial and postcolonial India to those of the German Jewish yekke population in mandate Palestine and early independent Israel, the women's movement in India in recent decades, and Protestants in contemporary America before the 2015 Obergefell decision legalizing same-sex marriage. There are multiple ways of trying to take control of a body of law, and for multiple reasons. A group may capture a body of personal law to perpetuate its own values within the group. It may try to control a territorial legal system to impose its values on the entire population. It may work across bodies of personal law to obtain as uniform a result as possible—as if the system were a unified field, not a segmented one. Or its group members may make available their legal expertise to shore up a newly independent state's legal system. The essay suggests that taking control of a body of law does not necessarily mean hijacking it.