Young and Billings: The Data on Civil Justice Needs in Rural America and Beyond
In An Intersectional Examination of U.S. Civil Justice Problems, Kathryne M. Young (George Washington University Law School) and Katie R. Billings (Sociology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst) take a deep empirical dive into the data around access to justice in civil matters.
Young and Billings build on existing research that explores how social axes such as race and class are associated with a person’s chance of experiencing a civil justice problem. Then, by conducting a detailed survey of 3,600 representative Americans, the authors expand the analysis to consider how other identities and under-studied factors may also influence a person’s chance of facing a civil justice problem. This more complete analysis considers not only gender, race, age, and class but also “several less-examined characteristics: queerness, disability, rurality, parental status, and experiences of trauma.”
Overall, this new survey largely verifies existing research on the importance of race, gender, age, and class in predicting a person’s likelihood of having a civil legal need. But the authors also find that other demographic factors that have not previously been part of the access to justice conversation, including queerness, physical disability, rurality, and parental status, are also “all significantly associated with people’s chances of experiencing at least one category of justice problem.”
Notably, the authors focus on exposure to civil legal problems or “justiciable events,” not only actual filed legal cases, in order to better assess true demands for civil legal services and the scope of any access to justice gaps. They group these potential civil legal needs into three broad categories related to employment, family structure, and debt. For each problem type, the authors note associations with identity and issue prevalence. The authors stress that characteristics like queerness, disability, rurality, and parental status are associated with “experiencing civil justice problems across the board—even problems that ostensibly have nothing to do with queerness, rurality, disability, or whether someone is a parent.”
For example, the authors find that respondents who self-identify as living in a rural location “are 43.6% more likely than non-rural dwellers to experience a family structure problem in the previous year.” The authors emphasize that multiple factors may influence this association, including not only a lack of infrastructure and physical access to legal resources in many rural places but also cultural norms and values that tend to encourage more self-help and self-sufficiency. The most common reason provided by rural residents for not accessing civil legal procedures in a family dispute was a desire to resolve the problem themselves.
The authors, overall, argue that this uniquely granular analysis should be used not only to help identify what actual civil justice needs are but also to better target what interventions might be most effective. In the rural context described above, for example, the authors suggest these findings may warrant greater appreciation for independence and autonomy as a rural value (with a greater focus on self-help legal strategies, for example) and, perhaps, more attention to family law matters in particular.
