We spent last week’s office hours brainstorming projects that we could work on to enhance Access to Justice. Here are some of our ideas on the whiteboard!
Some of the projects that started to emerge out of our massive whiteboarding:
- Crowdsourcing legal knowledge by making it really easy to share usable resources for dealing with law
- Potential of law students’ work in learning the law to be transformed into these online usable resources for lay people (potentially through Wikimedia, Quora, or another trusted knowledge site)
- How to help immigrants in the US navigate the visa system & immigration pathways, when they may be concerned that talking to a lawyer may get them in trouble
- How to help debtors who — going on rumor or Internet advice — feel convinced they can represent themselves, or who get convinced that they should file for bankruptcy even though it is transparent that they are doing it in bad faith
Some of the themes about what is motivating us:
- to provide an alternative to ‘shark’ lawyers who abuse the lay public, and put them in worse legal positions
- to help people get from Google Searches to responsible advocates, once they have a sense of their problem
