Proof Over Precedent

When law students have difficulty navigating the federal court records platform PACER, it's time to incorporate universal design. That's the suggested solution in this week's Proof Over Precedent episode. It's also a warning for the Case Modernization Effort currently underway: Pro se litigants represent a sizeable population using PACER, but their user experience has been overlooked in favor of representing the majority user experience by lawyers and court administrators. The result, thus far, has been problematic with a court records system that has become unwieldy in scale and unusable by those most in need of understanding it.

The seven-year-old Open Government Data Act has supported accessible, and useable, data from federal agencies, but it did not extend to the judiciary. This week's Proof Over Precedent episode discusses the massive amounts of data in federal, and particularly state, courts that serve as a missed opportunity to provide transparency, notice court trends, and foster collaboration, all in the name of building trust.

It helps to have a lawyer in court, no question. But in immigration court, where the vast majority of individuals are self-representing and not enough immigration lawyers exist to represent them all anyway, is there a point in asylum proceedings where an attorney could be most effective at supporting due process for clients?

No counsel, worse outcomes in immigration proceedings? This week on Proof Over Precedent, Access to Justice Lab Faculty Director and occasional podcast host Jim Greiner interviewed two Vera Institute of Justice researchers, Jacquelyn Pavilon and Neil Agrawal, about their study measuring the effect of a lawyer in detained 240 removal proceedings in Chicago Immigration Court. Did individuals with legal representation see a greater likelihood of relief, temporary relief, or bond hearings and releases than those without lawyers? The discussion follows both research methodology and adherence to due process.

We like to use Proof Over Precedent as a platform to highlight our evidence-based findings, as well as others' studies, from randomized control trials in the field of law. This is not one of those times. In this week's episode, Professor Jim Greiner talks with the A2J Lab researcher and data analyst who spent years working on our Online Courts study about the disappointment, frustration, and lessons learned from a flawed RCT. They still managed to glean a takeaway from comparing remote and in-person hearings for self-represented litigants in family court.