Access to Justice Ventures

🛫 Coast to coast with Access to Justice Ventures last week was killer! ☀ It was an honor to be part of a panel at the inaugural CogX Festival Los Angeles last Tuesday on the role of #AI in defending citizen rights in the future, with Sean West, Chris Brown & Joshua Browder. Lawyers can no longer be relied on to serve the vast majority of the public, or to make meaningful changes in our justice system, so it is time to get the #A2J message out to new audiences. 🗽 Later in the week, Chase Hertel and I delivered the closing keynote at Cities for Financial Empowerment Fund's FEC All-Partner Convening in NYC. Financial counseling is a powerful way to help people mitigate downstream legal issues like debt and eviction. Prevention can keep people out of a justice system that creates, punishes, and reinforces poverty. 🤘 Awesome and important conversations.

"Building on the foundations and realignment of justice-making values that prior innovations brought, a new movement to advance community-based justice workers has emerged nationally. In just over three and a half years, seven different community-based justice worker models have been authorized at the state level, in five jurisdictions. These efforts and the current national ecosystem are the culmination of years of community-centered research, cross-jurisdiction movement-building, and institutional advocacy at the highest levels in numerous states." https://lnkd.in/gn2YsZq7 #accesstojustice

Community-based justice workers are on the rise. The latest victory in South Carolina empowers trained NAACP advocates to help low-income community members facing eviction. https://lnkd.in/gZrVrKwD #accesstojustice

A bit more detail on the Institute for Justice, North Carolina Justice for All Project (www.ncjfap.org) challenge to North Carolina's UPL provision. ✍ Plaintiffs = The NCJFAP and two NC Certified Paralegals (and NCJFAP members): the former wishing to help people fill out certain court-created forms for free; the latter wishing to provide simple legal advice on court forms at a lower price than licensed attorneys in the same geographical area. 📑 Forms at Issue = "Plaintiffs want to provide simple legal advice on a variety of court created forms in family law, landlord-tenant law, and estate planning and probate services." 🏛 Argument = "Plaintiffs have a First Amendment right to give this advice, and the North Carolinians they would advise have a First Amendment right to hear it. That is because advice— including even expert advice on technical subjects—is speech. That is true regardless of the topic discussed or whether the speaker is paid." 🔎 Standard of Review = Strict Scrutiny. "The government must also show that its interests could not be achieved equally well through less restrictive regulatory schemes—such as limited practice rights for paralegals, as already exists in Arizona and Utah, or simply allowing nonlawyers to give paid legal advice, as is already the case in countries such as England and Wales." Find the complaint, here: https://lnkd.in/gVguRFDr

Now *this* is how you kick off a new year. 💥 The Institute for Justice in partnership with the North Carolina Justice for All Project (www.ncjfap.org) filed a First Amendment lawsuit in the Eastern District of North Carolina, challenging the state's prohibition on the unauthorized practice of law. Learn more and access the complaint 👇 https://lnkd.in/gzaDDauJ

Would you attend? 👀