India's Conception of Community Data and Addressing Concerns for Access to Justice.

This paper discusses the idea of community data that was introduced in the Non-Personal Data framework in India. Our interest is to engage with existing commentaries on the definitional challenges around who is a community, how it is constituted, who it represents, as well as propose a framework to be able to explore how to address concerns of access to justice. In our attempt to offer a model to operationalise community data, we argue that such community data justice includes three crucial aspects, that is, the identification of belonging with a community, the capacity to participate within a community, and finally opportunity to exit the community. Consequently, justice in terms of access to, and use of community data inherently includes an analysis of the individual's standing in the community.

Justice for rural women: An exploratory analysis of institutions and mechanisms to access justice in Chimborazo, Ecuador.

Access to justice is a fundamental principal of the rule of law. With this in mind, this research aims to analyze the mechanisms and barriers that women from rural areas in the province of Chimborazo, Ecuador, face when seeking justice. This investigation adopted a qualitative method approach, and was comprised of exploratory fieldwork as well as descriptive documentary analysis. The findings indicate that in this province, rural women's access to justice is facilitated through various government institutions and university legal clinics. These entities collaborate to spread awareness and offer direct legal assistance. However, despite these efforts, challenges persist, including the lack of specific data on the affected women's localities and the need for broader dissemination of available legal pathways. The study concludes that addressing these shortcomings is essential to further bolster the province's legal infrastructure and better address the intricate needs of its female population, particularly those from rural backgrounds.

Towards human-centred standards for legal help AI.

As more groups consider how AI may be used in the legal sector, this paper envisions how companies and policymakers can prioritize the perspective of community members as they design AI and policies around it. It presents findings of structured interviews and design sessions with community members, in which they were asked about whether, how, and why they would use AI tools powered by large language models to respond to legal problems like receiving an eviction notice. The respondents reviewed options for simple versus complex interfaces for AI tools, and expressed how they would want to engage with an AI tool to resolve a legal problem. These empirical findings provide directions that can counterbalance legal domain experts' proposals about the public interest around AI, as expressed by attorneys, court officials, advocates and regulators. By hearing directly from community members about how they want to use AI for civil justice tasks, what risks concern them, and the value they would find in different kinds of AI tools, this research can ensure that people's points of view are understood and prioritized, rather than only domain experts' assertions about people's needs and preferences around legal help AI. This article is part of the theme issue 'A complexity science approach to law and governance'.

HIV-related Legal Needs, Demographic Change, and Trends in Australia since 1992: A Review of Legal Administrative Data.

An enabling legal environment is essential for an effective HIV response. Using legal administrative data from the HIV/AIDS Legal Centre (HALC), Australia's specialist HIV community legal service, this article characterizes the nature and trends in the legal issues and needs of those with HIV-related legal issues in New South Wales, Australia since 1992. At present, approximately 40% of all PLHIV living in NSW receive a legal service from HALC during the most recent five-year period. Clients received legal services relating to immigration law at a greatly increased rate (2010: 36%; 2019: 53%), discrimination matters decreased (2010: 17%; 2019: 5.9%), wills and estates remained steady (2010: 9%; 2019: 8.3%). Most clients identify as male (76.9%), homosexual (55%) and are aged between 35 and 49 years of age (34.6%). This demographic profile of clients changed over time, becoming younger and more likely to have been born overseas, and increasingly identifying as heterosexual.

Family issues and custodial mothers' quest for justice: Evidence from Colombia.

Access to justice is limited for many worldwide. Although prior research generally recognizes the legal needs and barriers faced by women, less is known about mothers. This study examined the legal needs of mothers in different family configurations and the actions they took in response to these needs through the lens of help-seeking theories. We used unique data from the 2016 Colombian Quality of Life Survey (QLS) to produce descriptive statistics on the legal needs of mothers in two-parent families and custodial mothers. We then conducted multivariate analyses to examine the factors associated with having a family issue and seeking institutional help. Custodial mothers were more likely than mothers in two-parent families to have reported any legal need, and to report a family legal issue. The most frequent legal issues related to the family were issues with child support, custody, and/or visitation. The most frequent action taken to resolve issues was through an institutional actor. Among custodial mothers, single, younger mothers and mothers with more children were more likely to experience family legal issues, but they were not the ones seeking institutional help-those mothers were often more socioeconomically advantaged. That more socioeconomically disadvantaged mothers are more likely to experience a family legal issue but less likely to seek institutional help, the most frequent route to action, calls for research that examines the barriers faced by these mothers and policies to improve their access to justice.

Longer trips to court cause evictions.

Studying ∼200,000 evictions filed against ∼300,000 Philadelphians from 2005 to 2021, we focus on the role of transit to court in preventing tenants from asserting their rights. In this period, nearly 40% of tenants facing eviction were ordered to leave their residences because they did not show up to contest cases against them and received a default judgment. Controlling for a variety of potential confounds at the tenant and landlord level, we find that residents of private tenancies with longer transit travel time to the courthouse were more likely to default. A 1-h increase in estimated travel time increases the probability of default by between 3.8% and 8.6% points across different model specifications. The effect holds after adjusting for direct distance to the court, unobserved landlord characteristics, and even baseline weekend travel time. However, it is absent in public housing evictions, where timing rules are significantly laxer, and during the COVID-19 pandemic, when tenants had the opportunity to be present virtually. We estimate that had all tenants been equally able to get to the court in 10 min, there would have been 4,000 to 9,000 fewer default evictions over the sample period. We replicate this commuting effect in another dataset of over 800,000 evictions from Harris County, Texas. These results open up a new way to study the physical determinants of access to justice, illustrating that the location and accessibility of a courthouse can affect individual case outcomes. We suggest that increased use of video technology in court may reduce barriers to justice.

Access to Justice: The Quest for a Right of Appeal in New Zealand's Health and Disability Commissioner Complaints Scheme.

Given the absence of a civil damages action for personal injury in New Zealand, its Health and Disability Commissioner's (HDC) complaints process occupies a pivotal role in its medico-legal arrangements. Much hope was invested in it, but as currently configured, the regime is incapable of delivering justice or fulfilling its legislative purpose in a good number of cases. Many hundreds of complaints per annum, in which there is a strongly arguable case of deficient conduct or more than a mild departure from acceptable standards and in which a serious outcome has resulted, are not fully investigated; and there is no mechanism to appeal an adverse HDC decision that a party considers substantively unfair. Recent criticism of these issues by courts, the Chief Ombudsman, and commentators has mounted, and a petition to Parliament seeking legislative reform to create a right to appeal from adverse HDC decisions resulted in referral of the issue to the Commissioner to consider in an upcoming review, but hoped-for reform will not happen quickly.

Mediação sanitária como instrumento de efetivação do direito fundamental à saúde / Health mediation as an instrument for realizing the fundamental right to health

O paradigma de resolução de conflitos sanitários representado pela prestação judicial encontra-se em crise e não consegue responder aos litígios inerentes de forma qualitativa e quantitativamente adequada. Diante disso, este artigo buscou responder à questão: a mediação sanitária pode ser um instrumento adequado de acesso à justiça para o tratamento de conflitos relativos ao direito à saúde pública no Brasil? Analisaram-se aspectos teóricos (e jurídicos) do direito à saúde, enquanto direito humano e fundamental, e os contornos da crise da judicialização do direito à saúde, enquanto relevante para a quebra de paradigmas, para, por fim, investigar se a mediação sanitária pode ser ferramenta adequada de acesso à justiça, com suas respectivas implicações. Foi utilizada como procedimento metodológico a pesquisa documental, de caráter exploratório e de natureza qualitativa. Quanto às técnicas de pesquisa, de documentação direta e indireta, utilizaram-se notadamente a bibliográfica e a documental. O objeto de pesquisa possui relevância jurídica, social e econômica, haja vista que a crise dos direitos sociais representa uma crise de direitos humanos, afetando diretamente a dignidade da vida humana. A mediação sanitária revelou-se como uma ferramenta adequada de acesso à justiça nos conflitos jurídico-sanitários, pois transforma os antagonismos em pontos de convergência e colaboração, prevenindo e tratando os litígios de maneira dialógica, consensual e democrática.

The health conflict resolution paradigm represented by the judicial provision is in crisis and is unable to respond to the inherent disputes in a qualitative and quantitatively adequate way. However, the health conflict resolution paradigm represented by the judicial provision is in crisis and fails to respond to the inherent disputes in a qualitative and quantitatively adequate way. In view of this, this article aimed to respond to the question: Can health mediation be an adequate instrument of access to justice for the treatment of conflicts related to the right to public health in Brazil? It also analyzes some theoretical (and legal) aspects of the right to health as a human and fundamental right; and the contours of the crisis in the judicialization of the right to health, while it is relevant to the breaking of paradigms; to finally analyze whether health mediation can be an adequate tool for access to justice, with its respective implications. As methodological procedures, the following are used: the documentary research, of exploratory character, whose nature, from the point of view of the investigation of the problem, will be especially qualitative. As for the research techniques, of direct and indirect documentation, bibliographic and documental techniques are used. The research object has legal, social, and economic relevance, given that the crisis of social rights represents a crisis of human rights, directly affecting the dignity of human life. Health mediation proves to be an adequate tool for accessing justice related to legal-health conflicts, since it turns antagonisms into points of convergence and collaboration, preventing and treating disputes in a dialogical, consensual and democratic manner.

Imagining Resilient Courts: from COVID-19 to the Future of Canada's Court System.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has challenged an array of democratic institutions in complex and unprecedented ways. Little academic work, however, has considered the pandemic's impact on Canada's courts. This article aims to partially fill that gap by exploring the Canadian court system's response to COVID-19 and the prospects for administering justice amid disasters, all through the lens of resilience. After taking a forensic look at how the court system has managed the challenges brought on by COVID-19, we argue that features of resilience such as self-organization, flexibility, learning, and reflexive planning can contribute to the administration of justice during future shocks. We propose that the business of judging during shocks can become more integral to the business as usual of court systems. Imagining such a resilient court can be a way to step from COVID-19 to the future of Canada's court system.

La pandémie de la maladie à coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) a mis au défi un grand nombre d'institutions démocratiques, de manière complexe et inédite. Or, très peu de recherches universitaires se sont intéressées à l'impact de la pandémie sur les tribunaux canadiens. Cet article vise à combler partiellement cette lacune en explorant la réponse du système judiciaire canadien à la COVID-19 et l'administration de la justice pendant les moments de crise, dans l'optique de la résilience. Un regard attentif à la manière dont le système judiciaire a géré les défis occasionnés par la COVID-19 nous permet de voir que les aspects de résilience tels que l'auto-organisation, la flexibilité, l'apprentissage et la planification réflexive peuvent contribuer à l'administration de la justice lors de futurs chocs. Nous proposons donc que les procédures adoptées pendant les temps de crise deviennent une pratique plus courante. Un tel tribunal résilient serait une façon de passer au travers de la COVID-19 et d'aider le système judiciaire canadien à se propulser dans l'avenir.

Pandemic restrictions in Ethiopia: Impact on family law cases in Amhara regional state courts.

This article discusses the impact of pandemic restrictions on the family court system in Ethiopia. As lack of technological infrastructure made shifting to online services impossible, court services remained in-person. Public health measures required a drastic reduction in case hearings in order to allow social distancing. Both federal and regional state courts were partially closed from early March 2020 to end of September 2020 and only entertained cases of "urgent" nature that affected life, liberty, and public safety. The article focuses on strategies adopted by family courts in Amhara Regional State with respect to its impacts on litigating parties in such courts. It argues partial closure of court services disrupted access to justice in family law cases and increased vulnerability of women and children. This article proposes alternative strategies other than partial closure of court services.

Ontario family justice in "lockdown": Early pandemic cases and professional experience.

The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly affected families and children involved in Ontario's family justice system as well as family justice professionals in the province. In a span of two years, Ontario's family justice system has been fundamentally transformed, from a paper-based, in-person system to a paperless system in which many services, including judicial proceedings, continue to be largely delivered remotely. We report on the findings of two studies on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Ontario family justice: (1) an analysis of early pandemic court decisions; and (2) a survey of family justice professionals about their experiences during the early pandemic. We describe how the pandemic has exacerbated access to justice issues for certain groups, including families experiencing high conflict, victims of intimate partner violence, families involved in child welfare proceedings, and self-represented litigants, while improving access to justice for others by improving efficiency and reducing legal costs. As Ontario moves past the pandemic, the family justice system will need to ensure that technological advances improve access to justice for all court-involved families.

A Measure of Justice: Alternatives to Pursuing Criminal Accountability for Conflict-Related Sexual Violence in Sri Lanka.

Recent research conducted in Sri Lanka has revealed that victim survivors of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) and their notions of justice and accountability are influenced by their lack of trust in an ineffective criminal justice process. Moreover, the fear of reprisal by State allied perpetrators deters them from accessing formal justice. The failure of a criminal justice system steeped in patriarchal, discriminatory gender insensitive procedures in which CRSV victim survivors search for justice is analyzed through a recent judgment. The case highlights that searching for accountability in the current political context is not feasible and that CRSV victim survivors must be provided with support systems and forms of relief to move on with their lives until justice and accountability can be achieved. The article argues that although criminal accountability is the ideal, alternative possibilities for justice for CRSV victim survivors in Sri Lanka need to be explored, given the Sri Lankan political context and a criminal justice process fraught with many challenges. The role of the Office for Reparations in providing reparations to CRSV victim survivors and the options of a "partial" justice are discussed.

The Role of the Medical Profession in Occupational Lung Disease and Access to Compensation.

The relationship between exposure to toxins at work and lung diseases continues to be significantly under-recognised in Australia. Medical practitioners are well placed to identify occupational risk factors for disease. They can therefore play a vital role in informing regulatory responses, highlighting dangerous workplaces and supporting access to compensation to assist with better health outcomes for their patients. Increased awareness among medical practitioners of occupational factors can aid early diagnosis and improve patient outcomes by improving access to justice. Medical practitioners should be cognisant of the occupational causes of lung disease in Australia to support appropriate specialist referral and ensure patients can access additional support systems available through legal compensation systems. More broadly, medical professionals and lawyers assisting workers share the common aim of highlighting preventable diseases and advocating for change to help make workplaces safer.

Research agenda for algorithmic fairness studies: Access to justice lessons for interdisciplinary research.

Access to justice is one of the fundamental legitimating principles underlying all modern Western legal systems, yet its role in critical algorithm studies remains underdeveloped. In historical and methodological terms, the access to justice movement showcased multi- and interdisciplinary research on legal phenomena. We argue that interdisciplinary research on AI ethics and regulation, datafication of society, and algorithmic governance could benefit from adopting access to justice as a vantage point for bridging the different approaches in the context of administering justice. To this end, we explore technological, legal, and societal intersections to demonstrate how law, social sciences, and algorithm studies could benefit from a historically more informed and holistic approach facilitating more "cost-effective" interdisciplinary research collaboration. Such approach could assist the substantive study of algorithmic fairness to contribute actionable systemic solutions on what we perceive as systemic challenges. We propose utilizing access to justice as a boundary object for interdisciplinary dialogue over algorithmic fairness while respecting the epistemic diversity of disciplines.

Judicialisation, right to health and justice at Rio de Janeiro's 'Health Dispute Resolution Chamber': Users' conceptions.

The responses to the judicialisation are based on legal discourses and local practices that impact on access to health and justice. How citizens understand rights is key to holding government accountable. On a human right in health approach and emphasising the right to health and access to justice, this article explores these links through in-depth interviews of claimants at the Rio de Janeiro State Department, whose assist vulnerable groups. To the interviewees, the right to health was a remote, legal fiction, and entitlement and application were liable be treated 'flexibly'; judicialisation was a last resort to meet urgent demands and the impossibility of 'consuming' by their own means; the lawsuits as 'slow', 'painful' and unreliable in ensuring rights; access to health involved sacrifices and the need to fight for their rights. They understood was intimately bound up with the vulnerabilities, obstacles and service denial they had encountered previously. The bureaucratic, technological and technocratic dimensions of health care were incomprehensible and created barriers to access and conflicts. The findings suggested ineffective government responses to the main health problems of vulnerable populations and call for urgent efforts to address equitable and emancipatory implementation of health and justice policies.

O giro de 180 graus e as dificuldades processuais do acesso à Justiça do Trabalho / The 180 degree turn and the process difficulties of access to Labor Justice

Este artigo propõe uma reflexão crítica acerca das consequências processuais promovidas pela reforma trabalhista brasileira no tocante ao acesso à Justiça do Trabalho e à gestão dos conflitos laborais. Para tanto, analisa-se a origem dessa Justiça especializada e a sua evolução histórica, cuja tendência era de ampliação de suas competências. Tal estudo adotou, como orientação metodológica, o materialismo crítico-dialético, através da pesquisa documental e bibliográfica. Por último, foram listadas as principais inovações processuais determinadas pela reforma trabalhista que dificultaram o acesso do trabalhador ao Poder Judiciário, promovendo consequentemente um esvaziamento em seu campo jurisdicional.

This paper aims at a critical reflection on the procedural consequences made by the Brazilian Labor Reform regarding access to Labor Justice and the management of labor conflicts. First, we analyze the origin of this specialized justice and its historical evolution, whose tendency was to expand its competences. This study adopted, as methodological guidance, Marx's critical-dialectical materialism, through documentary and bibliographic research. Finally, we will list the main procedural innovations determined by the Labor Reform that made it difficult for workers to gain access to justice, thereby promoting an emptying of their jurisdictional field.

The Human Right to Justice for Older Persons With Mental Health Conditions.

This article explores the nature and extent of barriers to access to justice that older persons experience, including those with mental health conditions. It finds that access to justice-the right to fair, prompt and responsive decisions by administrative decision-makers and equal access to courts and tribunals to obtain timely and effective remedies-is not only an important right in itself but also enables the enjoyment of many other human rights. Yet older persons, particularly those with mental health conditions, face a significant "justice gap." Ageist attitudes, laws and practices interact with other forms of bias such as mentalism, sexism, ableism, racism, homophobia, and heterosexism exacerbating older persons' disadvantage and marginalization, particularly those with mental health conditions, and older indigenous persons. These discriminatory practices, together with the phenomena of elder abuse, all severely limit older persons' access to timely and responsive justice. International and national standards, both general and specific to older persons, have been shown to be inadequate to respond to this justice gap. An international standard in the form of a binding legal obligation that specifically addresses older persons' rights of access to justice is needed urgently as part of a new international treaty on the human rights of older persons.

Requerimento administrativo prévio e judicialização da saúde pública: uma análise do requisito e de suas exceções / Prior administrative request and judicialization of public health: An analysis of the requirement and its exceptions / Prior administrative request and judicialization of public health: An analysis of the requirement and its exceptions

O estudo analisou em que medida o requerimento administrativo prévio deve condicionar o acesso à justiça em demandas sobre saúde pública. Inicialmente, adotou-se o método dedutivo para, a partir da concepção de princípios presente na teoria dos direitos fundamentais de Robert Alexy, investigar a possibilidade de exigência desse pressuposto processual no contexto de colisão entre os princípios do acesso à justiça e os do devido processo legal instaurada para a proteção do direito fundamental à saúde. Em seguida, por meio do método indutivo, analisaram-se os fundamentos do julgamento do Supremo Tribunal Federal que condicionara o ajuizamento de ações previdenciárias ao requerimento administrativo prévio a fim de identificar se, consideradas as semelhanças e diferenças, essas razões seriam também aplicáveis, e em que medida, às demandas em matéria de saúde pública. Após, expuseram-se contribuições da adoção do prévio requerimento administrativo como requisito ao processamento de ações judiciais sobre saúde pública para o aprimoramento qualitativo da política pública sanitária, bem como para a prestação jurisdicional e a resolução adequada de conflitos nesse campo. Ao final, investigaram-se os limites e exceções a serem observados quanto à exigência de prévio requerimento administrativo em ações sobre saúde pública, com base na fundamentalidade do direito à saúde e nos parâmetros que vêm sendo consolidados na jurisprudência dos tribunais superiores, nos enunciados das Jornadas de Direito da Saúde e na literatura especializada.

The study analyzed to what extent the prior administrative request should condition the access to justice in public health demands. Initially, the deductive method was adopted, based on the concept of principles present in Robert Alexy's theory of fundamental rights, to investigate the possibility of requiring this procedural assumption in the context of the collision between the principles of access to justice and due process of law established for the protection of the fundamental right to health. Then, through the inductive method, we analyzed the fundamentals of Supreme Court judgment that conditioned the filing of social security lawsuits to the prior administrative request in order to identify whether, considered as similarities and differences, these possible reasons would also be applicable, and to what extent, to the demands in terms of public health. Afterwards, the contributions of the adoption of the prior administrative request as a requirement for processing lawsuits on public health for the qualitative improvement of public health policy were exposed, as well as for the provision of jurisdiction and the appropriate resolution of conflicts in this field. At the end, the limits and exceptions to be observed regarding the requirement of prior administrative request in public health lawsuits were investigated, based on the fundamentals of the right to health and on the parameters that have been consolidated in the jurisprudence of the higher courts, in the statements of the Health Law Conferences and in the specialized literature.

Using random assignment to measure court accessibility for low-income divorce seekers.

We conducted a field experiment in which 311 low-income individuals seeking a divorce were randomly assigned to receive access to a pro bono lawyer (versus minimal help) to assist with filing for divorce. Examining court records, we found that assignment to an attorney made a large difference in whether participants filed for and obtained a divorce. Three years after randomization, 46% of the treated group had terminated their marriages in the proper legal venue, compared to 9% of the control group. Among "compliers"-participants who obtained representation only if assigned to receive it-those with lawyers were far more likely to file for and obtain a divorce than those not assigned lawyers. Because divorce implicates fundamental constitutional interests and can be effectuated only by resort to the courts, the US Constitution requires that dissolution of marriage be made achievable regardless of ability to pay. Yet, we observed few low-income individuals who were able to initiate divorce suits on their own. Through interviews and archival research, we identified barriers that low-income litigants faced in navigating the divorce system, including mandatory wait times, limited hours at important facilities, and burdensome paperwork sometimes requiring access to photocopiers and typewriters. This study therefore documents a salient instance in which a civil legal process was inaccessible to those without lawyers, even though their legal issues were straightforward, involving few if any matters for courts to adjudicate.

Consumer Fraud: Older People's Perceptions and Experiences.

In view of the growing need to address the rights of older people as consumers, this study captures the perceptions and meanings that older people attribute to their experiences as older consumers, particularly regarding consumer fraud, using qualitative-phenomenological methodology based on semi-structured, open-ended interviews with 16 older consumers in Israel. The findings raise distinctive aspects of their experiences, including physical and cognitive characteristics of aging, social response to aging, and involvement of family members in decision making and support. The study concludes by offering several sociolegal policy recommendations for protecting older consumers, directed to them, their family members, professionals interacting with them, and the legal system.