Roles Beyond Lawyers (RBLs) encompass a range of service models for civil legal assistance that draw upon personnel who have not received full formal legal training. These programs attempt to achieve the goals of increasing access to justice and ensuring consumer protection. The Roles Beyond...

Most of the civil justice problems Americans experience never receive service from an attorney. Indeed, daily around the country, thousands of people arrive at court not only without a lawyer to represent them, but also without an understanding of where to go, what to do, or what will happen...

In contemporary market democracies, law reaches deeply into many aspects of daily life. Thousands of Americans every day find themselves facing troubles that emerge “at the intersection of civil law and everyday adversity,” involving work, finances, insurance, pensions, wages, benefits,...

Lawyers keep the gates of public justice institutions, particularly through their roles in formal procedures like hearings and trials. Yet, it is not clear what lawyers do in such quintessentially legal settings: conclusions from past research are bedeviled by a lack of clear theory and...

In the United States, among the most common responses to justiciable problems – non-trivial problems that raise civil legal issues – is to do nothing. The probability of taking no action varies inversely with income, with poor households least likely to take any action to attempt to resolve...

This article describes a proposed randomized control trial (RCT) involving individuals in financial distress, specifically, individuals sued on a credit card debt collection case by a debt buyer or creditor. The aim of the RCT is to evaluate the effectiveness of two interventions often proposed...