In the U.S., legal researchers, unlike medical professionals, do not have the benefit of drawing funds from a federal agency like the National Institute of Health, which provides more than $30B in grants annually to medical researchers. As such, systemic efforts to collect data about the health of legal systems have been lacking.

There has been somewhat of a renaissance in access to justice research in recent years, which Elizabeth Chambliss, Renee Newman Knake and Robert L. Nelson explore in their paper entitled, “Introduction: What We Know and Need to Know About the State of ‘Access to Justice’ Research”.

At the forefront of this access to justice renaissance there has been a collection of 16 seminal White Papers published through the American Bar Association’s Commission on the Future of Legal Services. According to Chambliss et al, the collection has two primary goals:

1.  To inform the Commission and its audience about the facts on the ground by presenting the most recent research on issues of relevance to the Commission
2. To promote the development of shared conversations among academic researchers, legal services providers, and legal services regulators

To use the words of Chambliss et al, “taken together, these sixteen White Papers offer a rich, empirically grounded survey of ‘what we know and need to know’ about the future of legal services.”

For information about the various White Paper topics and themes as well as other access to justice initiatives, view the Report .

One of the most pressing access to justice challenges facing low and middle-income countries is being able to offer basic legal services in a financially viable manner. As a means of addressing this problem, the UK-based Law and Development Partnership recently wrote a report entitled “Developing a portfolio of financially sustainable scalable basic legal service models.”

Looking at 17 countries as case studies, the report calculates the costs of taking particular interventions to scale by factoring variables such as population size and delivery costs. In terms of its methodological approach, the report seeks to answer three key questions:

1. What do we know about the unit costs of basic legal services and how can we calculate them;
2. How can scaled up legal services be financed sustainably; and
3. What are the political conditions that enable justice models to be taken to scale?

Beyond suggesting increases in government funding, the report looks at a variety of other options to scale up delivery, drawing on examples from health and education sectors as well as private sector sources. Some of the report’s key recommendations include:

• Using legal needs surveys more widely in justice sector interventions to gain a better understanding of basic legal services demand
• Piloting more innovative financing mechanisms and modalities, as well partnerships between donors and private investors to open up funding streams
• Incorporating the collection of a broader range of cost and benefit data in basic legal service programing to asses the value for money of provision

View a brief description of the report or read a full version of the “Developing a portfolio of financially sustainable, scalable basic legal service models” report.