Jamila Michener (Cornell Political Science) asks how we might rethink access to justice as a political movement, not a legal one. She focuses on the “Civil Gideon” movement as a case study in how breaking the lawyers’ monopoly will require a political movement that sees access-to-legal service as part of a larger system of change. Michener’s contribution both further illuminates the right-to-counsel movement – including its weaknesses and (Michener argues) limited impact – and recontextualizes it, describing an essential role for counsel within broader organizing efforts.

Neil Steinkamp and Samantha DiDimenico, strategic consultants who have done extensive work on access-to-justice issues, offer a unique how-to guide for engaging courts and community stakeholders in order to generate quantitative and qualitative data that can contribute to reform efforts. Focusing on “civil Gideon,” a growing set of efforts to establish a “right to counsel” akin to what criminal defendants have long enjoyed under the Sixth Amendment, Steinkamp offers a step-by-step roadmap for developing an empirically rigorous and comprehensively informed dialogue toward regulatory reform.