The Social, Geographic, and Organizational Determinants of Access to Civil Legal Aid Services: An Argument for an Integrated Access to Justice Model

• Author: Eric W. Schultheis
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/jels.12049
• Published date: 01 September 2014
• Date: 01 September 2014

The Social, Geographic, and

Organizational Determinants of Access to

Civil Legal Aid Services: An Argument for

an Integrated Access to Justice Model

Eric W. Schultheis*

I propose an integrated method for evaluating the accessibility of civil legal aid services, one

that is able to simultaneously account for spatial, social, and organizational accessibility

determinants. Specifically, I use this study to empirically evaluate several core assumptions of

accessibility research. First, I challenge the argument that gaps in the accessibility of civil

legal aid services are driven by spatial mismatches and/or disconnects between supply and

demand. Although these two factors are important, they only provide a partial explanation

of the observed variation in the accessibility of civil legal aid services. Second, I challenge the

commonplace assumption in accessibility research that the effects of accessibility determi-

nants, including the spatial relationship between client and provider location, are consistent

across social and geographic space. In addition to raising these issues, I also propose and

develop a hierarchical linear model that attempts to bridge methodological approaches that

limit our understanding of the interactions of the spatial, social, and organizational dimen-

sions of civil legal aid services accessibility . Perhaps most importantly, the proposed acces-

sibility model begins to offer providers novel insights into how to better allocate program

resources to best serve their client population.

Equal justice under the law is not merely a caption on the facade of the Supreme Court building, it is perhaps

the most inspiring ideal of our society. It is one of the ends for which our entire legal system exists . . . it is

fundamental that justice should be the same, in substance and availability, without regard to economic status.

Lewis Powell, Jr., U.S. Supreme Court Justice

*Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, 77 Massachusetts Ave., Cam-

bridge, MA 02139; email: schulthe@mit.edu. Schultheis is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Urban Studies

and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and holds a Juris Doctorate from the University of

Southern California Gould School of Law. He was a staff attorney for and co-manager of the Race Equity Project at

Legal Services of Northern California prior to pursuing his doctoral studies at MIT.

I am particularly grateful for the guidance and comments that Dr. Amy K. Glasmeier, Dr. Rebecca L. Sandefur, and

Dr. James Greiner provided on various drafts of this article and the comments of the anonymous referees. The usual

disclaimer that all errors are attributable to me applies.

Conflict of Interest Statement: The author has no commercial or financial interests that might pose a conflict of

interest in connection with the research study. No external sources of funding facilitated this research study. The

author is a former employee of the organization whose client management system data are used in this study. The

author and the organization executed a Memorandum of Understanding that unequivocally stated the author’s

control over the study’s design, interpretation, and results in accordance with the author’s institution’s policy of

academic freedom and integrity.

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Journal of Empirical Legal Studies

Volume 11, Issue 3, 541–577, September 2014

541

I. Introduction

Justice Powell’s words reflect an aspirational value of many members of U.S. society. The

simplicity of Justice Powell’s statement, however, belies the complexity of ensuring that all

persons are provided with justice, in both substance and availability. In recent decades,

frontline social justice advocates and scholars engaged in critical and feminist legal practice

and research that substantially deepened how we understand and measure justice “in

substance.” However, our understanding of the “availability” of justice still bears substantial

conceptual clarification. Availability surely encompasses the right and ability to have one’s

day in court. It also must include some ability to access counsel or legal assistance. Beyond

such generalities, what does availability of justice mean? Do the characteristics of the person

seeking justice, such as race, wealth, and English-language proficiency, impact the avail-

ability of justice? Do the arrangements of institutions of justice, such as staffing levels or the

ratio of paralegals to attorneys, impact how justice seekers interact with institutions of

justice and the availability of justice? Lastly, does the spatial relationship between justice

seekers and institutions of justice, for instance, the distance between where the justice

seeker resides and the locations of institutions of justice, impact the availability of justice?

In sum, how do social, geographic, and organizational arrangements impact the availability

of justice? In this study, I explore one component of the availability of justice, namely, the

accessibility of civil legal aid services among low-income households.

Access to civil legal aid services is a complex and multifaceted issue. Not surprisingly,

studies dealing with access to civil legal aid services among low-income persons tend to

focus on one or two of the dimensions of accessibility. Sociologists of law generally seek to

understand how social attributes mediate legal need and the use of legal institutions.

Geographers focus on the geographic distributions of legal institutions and legally needy

persons. Organizational scholars examine how the structure and organizational character-

istics of legal institutions are related to the justice system’s ability to accomplish its purpose.

Each of these research strands is necessary. However, taken alone, these individual strands

of knowledge capture only one part of the dimensionality of access to justice and risk

incompletely or mistakenly theorizing and understanding the access to justice problem.1

In the present study, I propose an integrated method for evaluating the accessibility

of civil legal aid services; one that is able to account for (1) the geographic relationship

between client and provider, (2) the organizational characteristics of individual providers,

and (3) the social characteristics of the potential client population. The proposed method

allows for the simultaneous analysis of social, geographic, and organizational determinants

of access to civil legal aid services. This effort is motivated by a desire to advance an

accessibility model that is both theoretically and empirically grounded. The development of

such a model is not, however, a purely academic enterprise. Such a model is critical to

evaluate the performance of the civil legal aid services delivery system. Perhaps more

1This fact is at least as much due to disciplinary affiliation and training as it is to the difficulty of addressing multiple

issues in a single study. Although this separation is evident in the literature, individual researchers likely recognize the

multidimensionality of accessibility even if this recognition is not evident in individual studies.

542 Schultheis

importantly, an integrated accessibility model begins to offer providers insights into how to

better allocate program resources to best serve their client population or, put differently,

such a model can serve as a foundation upon which to build a “rational basis of planning

in the administration of justice” (Economides et al. 1986).

This article is broken into three sections. In Section I, I critique past and current

approaches to defining accessibility to justice for low-income individuals and families and

construct an alternate conceptual model to evaluate the accessibility of civil legal aid

services. In Section I, I am primarily concerned with (1) establishing why access to civil

legal aid services matters and (2) engaging the various theoretical constructs related to

access to civil legal aid services. In Section II, I empirically test (1) the various definitions

of access to civil legal aid services that scholars employ and (2) the proposed Integrated

Access to Justice Model (IA2J). I attempt to employ generally accessible language and

exemplars in the Section II discussion. However, I provide a more technical discussion of

the statistical modeling method employed in Appendix 1. The inclusion of the material

in Appendix 1 allows interested readers to understand the statistical methods employed

while also ensuring that readers who are primarily interested in substantive findings or

who are less familiar with statistical modeling are not burdened by a discussion of statis-

tical modeling. Lastly, in Section III, I summarize this study’s findings and discuss the

implications of this study for academic research on the accessibility of civil legal aid

services.

A. A Disconnect Between Supply and Demand

Demand for civil legal services2among low-income persons is high. Estimates of the rate at

which low-income persons experience a civil legal problem are inexact and vary by the

method used to derive the estimate, the type of civil legal aid issue examined, and context.

Despite the variety of civil legal problem occurrence rate estimates in low-income popula-

tions, the sheer magnitude of the low-income population suggests that, even when the most

conservative problem rate estimates are applied, the demand for civil legal services among

low-income populations is substantial. For instance, in California in 2009, there were

approximately 7.06 million low-income persons when we define a low-income person as

having a ratio of income to the Federal Poverty Limit below 2 (U.S. Census Bureau 2009).

In Texas in 2009, there were 9.22 million low-income persons. In Mississippi in 2009, there

were approximately 1.27 million low-income persons (U.S. Census Bureau 2009). In Hawaii

in 2009, there were approximately 307,000 low-income persons under this definition (U.S.

Census Bureau 2009). Even if the problem rate of civil legal issues is as low as one person

in five per calendar year, an assumption that is well below the average estimated problem

occurrence rate, the magnitude of civil legal problems among the low-income population

2Civil legal issues are related to individual or group rights as opposed to issues related to military, criminal, or

admiralty law. Civil legal issues include, but are not limited to, family law matters such as custody and child support;

landlord tenant law issues including eviction proceedings; contract disputes; and civil rights matters including

litigation under the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Fair Housing Act.

Determinants of Access to Civil Legal Aid Services 543