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| Matthew Burnett |
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| Rebecca Sandefur |
Around the country, a new justice worker movement is gaining tremendous momentum.
In just the last two months, legal profession leaders have formally encouraged state and other courts to study and support justice worker programs as a tool to address our country's growing crisis around access to civil justice.
On July 30, the Conference of Chief Justices and Conference of State Court Administrators passed a resolution encouraging "members to examine whether authorized justice practitioners [including community justice workers and licensed paraprofessionals] could be beneficial to expand access to legal representation and to take appropriate steps to explore and discuss such possibilities."[1]
On Aug. 12, the American Bar Association's House of Delegates adopted Resolution 605, "urg[ing] each state, territorial, and tribal highest court to study community justice worker programs implemented in several U.S. jurisdictions … and to adopt programs appropriate for their jurisdiction to expand the accessibility, affordability, and quality of civil legal services provided to those who cannot afford an attorney."[2]
The ABA's resolution is unprecedented in its support of exploring nonlawyers as a solution to the access to justice crisis, originating in the ABA's Standing Committee on Legal Aid and Indigent Defense, and supported by referrals from 14 ABA entities.
We should celebrate these critical recognitions of the access to civil justice crisis — which is enormous in scale — and of the pressing need to empower everyday Americans to help their neighbors resolve their civil justice problems. Also welcome and important is these resolutions' calls for study and research.
As they explore justice worker authorization, civil justice policymakers and practitioners face three key questions: (1) What do we already know about justice workers and their impact in the U.S. and abroad; (2) what do we need to know to inform effective policy and practice; and (3) how can we know it?
1. What We Know
Authorized justice workers are already at work around the U.S. For example, they provide representation in a range of federal fora, including complex immigration, veterans' issues, Social Security and employment matters.
Two states, Alaska and Arizona, have already broadly authorized justice worker programs assisting people both in and out of state courts. Utah's regulatory sandbox also currently authorizes justice workers. Other states, including Delaware, Hawaii and South Carolina, have authorized more narrow carveouts. And even more states have proposals underway.
Routes to authorizaton are varied: unauthorized practice of law waivers, court orders, federal regulations and regulatory sandboxes. Authorizations permit justice worker practice in a wide range of matters, including domestic violence, public benefits, consumer debt, wills, child welfare, evictions and more.
Some justice workers are community volunteers, others are staff of government or nongovernmental organizations, and still others work providing critical community services — as librarians, social workers, health aides and the like — and have chosen to upskill in law to better serve their neighbors.
Research into American justice work, as well as that happening in other countries, demonstrates clearly that trained justice workers can and do provide impactful, effective legal services both inside formal hearings and outside of them.[3]
2. What We Need to Know
A critical challenge of America's access to justice crisis is scale: The sheer volume of unmet legal needs is enormous, and our current service models do not meet it.
Because justice worker training is focused and low-barrier, these programs have enormous capacity to scale. What are effective models of recruiting, training and supporting justice workers? What models of authorizing justice work are supportive of scaling?
Another critical challenge for access to justice solutions is sustainability — enabling programs that do good work to persist in doing it. What are durable, resilient models for staffing and resourcing justice work?
Helping people take action on their justice issues is a way of securing basic needs like food security, income maintenance, healthcare, dignified work, safe and secure housing, and care for dependents. What are the collateral benefits of justice work — for example, by preventing homelessness, poverty, or unemployment, and supporting better health and relationships?
Being able to access justice not only helps meet life's practical needs, it also enables people to use — rather than be locked out of or estranged from — their own law, engaging them directly with their democracy.
These are just some of the issues we should be studying.[4]
3. How We Can Know It
If this is some of what we need to know to chart a path to effective, scalable and sustainable justice worker regulation and programs, how can we know it?
The Conference of Chief Justices, the Conference of State Court Administrators and the ABA call on jurisdictions to study justice worker programs and evidence-based policy formation. Yet here, we run into a paradox: It's not possible to empirically research things that can't happen. No one is able to study justice worker activities that don't exist because they are not authorized, and in most states are criminalized under UPL statutes.
Without launching new programs with broad authorization that can attempt to meet the challenges of scale and sustainability — that is, not just pilot programs — it will be difficult, if not impossible, to understand what works and how to scale these programs, and ensure that they are sustainable for both the organizations that support them and justice workers themselves.
Fortunately, there is growing interest among empirical researchers in justice work and the regulatory changes that enable it. Study is already underway for some active programs, including in places where activity is more developed, such as Alaska, Arizona and Utah. The newly authorized programs will be rich sites for learning.
Policymakers and programs have opportunities to partner with researchers to learn about what works to create effective, scalable and sustainable justice worker models. Rigorous research needs to be adequately resourced, including by incorporating funds for study into grant proposals and appropriations.
Conclusion
This is a critical moment for access to justice — not only because of the crisis, but also because of the promise. Access to justice furthers more than one great good: It is a way of acting on and resolving concrete challenges faced by people and communities, and it strengthens democracy.
In our democracy, justice is meant to be everyone's. Expanding who can engage in justice work gives more people accessible entry points to use the law to work on life's problems. And, it opens up space for more of us to enact our democratic rights and duties, using the law when we need to and working to change the law when it needs change.
Justice work is a critical part of our shared democratic project. An evidence-based understanding of how to make it work is an essential part of making a good, fair and free life together.
Matthew Burnett is the director of research and programs for the Access to Justice Research Initiative at the American Bar Foundation, a visiting scholar with the Justice Futures Project at Arizona State University, and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center. He is also a co-founder of Frontline Justice, as well as the Justice Worker Lab at ASU.
Rebecca Sandefur is a professor at Arizona State University and a faculty fellow at the American Bar Foundation, where she founded the Access to Justice Research Initiative. She is also a co-founder of Frontline Justice, as well as the Justice Worker Lab at ASU.
The opinions expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of their employer, its clients, or Portfolio Media Inc., or any of its or their respective affiliates. This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal advice.
[1] Resolution 1-2025 In Support of Exploring Access to Justice Through Authorized Justice Practitioner Programs, https://ccj.ncsc.org/resources-courts/support-exploring-access-justice-through-authorized-justice-practitioner-programs.
[2] http://americanbar.org/groups/leadership/house_of_delegates/2025hodannualmeeting/?utm_source=loom&utm_medium=sm&utm_campaign=res605, https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/house_of_delegates/2025-annual-supplemental-materials/605-rev.pdf.
[3] See, for example, Herbert M. Kritzer, Legal advocacy: Lawyers and nonlawyers at work. University of Michigan Press, 1998; Richard Moorhead, Avrom Sherr, Lisa Webley, Sarah Rogers, Lorraine Sherr, Alan Patterson, and Simon Domberger. Quality and cost: final report on the contracting of Civil, Non-Family Advice and Assistance Pilot. The Stationary Office, 2001; Rebecca L. Sandefur, "Legal advice from nonlawyers: consumer demand, provider quality, and public harms." Stan. JCR & CL16 (2020):283. Rebecca L. Sandefur and Thomas Clarke. "Roles beyond Lawyers: Summary, Recommendations and Research Report of an Evaluation of the New York City Court Navigators Program and Its Three Pilot Projects." (2016).
[4] For examples of recent scholarship on the justice worker movement in the US, see Burnett, Matthew and Rebecca L. Sandefur, Justice Work as Democracy Work: Reimagining Access to Justice as Democratization," South Carolina Law Review (2025); Sandefur, Rebecca L. and Matthew Burnett, "Building Successful Justice Worker Programs: Emerging Insights from Research and Practice," Alaska Law Review (2025); and Burnett, Matthew and Rebecca L. Sandefur, "A People-Centered Approach to Designing and Evaluating Community Justice Worker Programs in the United States," Fordham Urban Law Journal (2024).