Justice you
can't afford
isn't justice.
The Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments promise every American a fair hearing. In practice, that promise is rationed by price. We are building the infrastructure to make it real — through representation, technology, and law reform.
Substantial civil legal problems faced by low-income Americans that received inadequate help or none at all.
Legal Services Corporation, Justice Gap Study (2022)
The scale was never
broken. It was
weighted.
Nobody repealed the right to counsel. It was hollowed out — by cost, by complexity, by a court system designed for lawyers and populated by people who don't have one.
In roughly three out of four civil cases in America, at least one side has no lawyer. That is about 15 million cases a year in which someone stands alone against an opponent who doesn't. The outcome is usually decided before the hearing begins.
of low-income households hit at least one civil legal problem in a single year.
LSC Justice Gap, 2022doubt they could find a lawyer they could actually afford if they needed one.
LSC Justice Gap, 2022renters face eviction filings each year. Around 2.9 million of them are children.
Graetz et al., via Housing Policy DebateA right that only the solvent can exercise is a privilege.Our founding premise
Fifty-one wealthy nations.
We finished fifty-first.
Every year the World Justice Project scores 143 countries on a single, plain question: can ordinary people actually access and afford civil justice? Among high-income nations, the United States does not place near the bottom. It is the bottom — and it is not close.
among high-income countries on whether people can access and afford civil justice. Dead last.
WJP Index 2025 · sub-factor 7.1globally — behind countries with a small fraction of our wealth, our lawyers, and our courts.
WJP Index 2025 · sub-factor 7.1our score, on a scale of 0 to 1. The next-worst wealthy nation scores 0.53. Denmark scores 0.80.
WJP Index 2025 · sub-factor 7.1World Justice Project, Rule of Law Index 2025 — Factor 7.1, "People can access and afford civil justice." Scores retrieved from the World Bank Data360 distribution of the WJP dataset; income grouping per World Bank classification (51 high-income countries appear in the 2025 Index).
Just last month, the World Justice Project released its annual ranking of countries on their compliance with various measures of the rule of law, including the accessibility and affordability of civil justice. Of 142 countries, the United States is 115th. Among the 46 wealthiest countries, the United States ranks 46th — let that sink in: we rank last on accessibility and affordability of civil justice. This means a lack of access to basic civil legal needs involving issues like housing and evictions, employment, or public benefits.
Associate Attorney General of the United States — the third-ranking official at the Department of Justice.
Published by the Department of Justice · justice.gov
Gupta was citing the 2023 Index. Two editions later, nothing has improved: in 2025 the United States ranks 112th of 143, and still last among wealthy nations.
Three levers, pulled together.
Charity alone can't close a gap this size — there will never be enough donated hours. So we work the supply of help, the tools people use, and the rules that constrain both.
Put a human in the room
Fund and train frontline advocates where representation collapses first: eviction, debt collection, family safety, benefits.
- Right-to-counsel campaign support
- Community justice worker training
- Same-day courthouse defense desks
Arm the self-represented
Most people will still walk in alone. Give them plain-language guidance, deadline tracking, and drafted documents — free, and reviewed by lawyers.
- Open-source court form engine
- Deadline and hearing alerts by SMS
- Human review before anything is filed
Change the rules
Simplify what courts demand, and let trained non-lawyers do work that doesn't require a JD. This is the only lever that scales without new money.
- Plain-language procedure reform
- Licensed paraprofessional expansion
- Default judgment safeguards
A lawyer changes the ending.
This isn't theory. Cities that guaranteed counsel in eviction court published their numbers. The gap between represented and unrepresented tenants is not a margin — it's a different outcome entirely.
Sources: Philadelphia FY2023 RTC evaluation; City of Boulder eviction dashboard, Jan 2025; Heartland Center for Jobs & Freedom, Kansas City, 2024.
"I got the papers on a Thursday. The hearing was the next Tuesday. I read it four times and I still didn't know if I was supposed to show up or write something first. So I didn't do either."
Most cases against unrepresented people are not lost at trial. They are lost by default — by a missed deadline, an unread form, a hearing nobody knew how to attend. That is the failure we are engineered to catch.
This is not left
versus right.
It's whether the Constitution means anything to a person who can't pay for it. Get the monthly brief — case data, reform wins, and where the fight is next.
A quiet,
documented
collapse.
The civil justice gap is not a rumor or a slogan. It has been measured repeatedly, by the federal corporation Congress created to fund legal aid, and the numbers have barely moved in twenty years.
of substantial civil legal problems got inadequate help or none.
LSC, 2022who never sought help cited cost as a reason they didn't try.
LSC, 2022civil cases a year where at least one party has no lawyer.
Stanford Law, via ABALast among the wealthy.
The World Justice Project asks households and practitioners in 143 countries whether people can access and afford civil justice, and scores each country from 0 to 1. Below, the United States against the other G7 economies and the top of the table. This is not a gap at the margin — the distance between the United States and the next-worst wealthy nation is larger than the distance between that nation and Canada.
World Justice Project, Rule of Law Index 2025 — Factor 7.1, "People can access and afford civil justice," scored 0 to 1. Retrieved from the World Bank Data360 distribution of the WJP dataset. Income grouping per World Bank classification; 51 high-income countries appear in the 2025 Index. Ranks shown are global, out of 143.
How a right disappears
without being repealed.
Gideon v. Wainwright guaranteed counsel to people accused of crimes. It did not reach civil court. So the proceedings that decide where you live, whether you keep your children, whether your wages are seized, and whether you keep your disability benefits carry no right to a lawyer at all.
These are the cases most Americans will actually face. And they are the ones where you are most likely to stand alone.
In eviction court, the imbalance is structural rather than incidental. In Philadelphia landlord-tenant court, roughly 80–85% of landlords appear with counsel while only 5–8% of tenants do. Nationally, tenants have had representation in something on the order of 3% of eviction cases.
Institutional repeat players know the rules, the judges, and the calendar. The other side is reading a form for the first time.
Sources: NCCRC Philadelphia summary; national representation estimates, 2023.
The dominant way people lose is not argument — it's absence. In some jurisdictions upward of 90% of tenants facing eviction never appear in court at all, which makes them nearly impossible to reach with help even when help exists.
Where counsel arrives, defaults collapse. Philadelphia recorded 2.8% default judgments among represented tenants against 38.7% among unrepresented ones in FY2023. New York City's default judgments in housing court fell about 34% in the first years of its right-to-counsel program.
Whole counties have almost no practicing attorneys. Rural households in the LSC study went without adequate help for about 94% of their civil legal problems — worse than the national figure. Driving three hours to a metro area is not a remedy when you have a job and no childcare.
This is why we invest in trained community advocates rather than waiting for lawyers to relocate.
Court procedure is written for professionals. Service rules, answer deadlines, exhibit requirements and continuance standards are all knowable — and all opaque to a first-time litigant with five days' notice.
Every unnecessary procedural step is a private tax paid by whoever can least afford to hire a translator.
The turn-away rate hasn't improved since 2005.Legal Services Corporation
What we don't claim.
We think a movement earns trust by marking the limits of its own evidence. So: most right-to-counsel results are program evaluations and observational comparisons, not randomized trials. Represented tenants may differ from unrepresented ones in ways the numbers don't capture. The direction and size of the effect is consistent across many cities, which is why we act on it — but we will not overstate it.
We also publish figures that cut against us. If a program we fund underperforms, it appears in the annual report with the ones that worked.
Five programs.
One thesis.
Every program below is modeled on something that already produced measurable results somewhere in the United States. We are not inventing a new theory of justice — we are scaling what states like Arizona and Utah, and cities like Philadelphia and Kansas City, have already tested.
Community Justice Workers
Train trusted people who are already embedded in communities — domestic violence advocates, housing counselors, tribal service staff — to give limited-scope legal help under court authorization, with lawyer mentors behind them.
- Modeled on Arizona's statewide CJW authorization (2020→2023)
- Utah's Office of Legal Services Innovation sandbox
- Targets legal deserts first
Eviction Defense Desks
Same-day representation at the courthouse door, plus outreach before the hearing date — because the people who need counsel most are the ones who never show up to be offered it.
- Pre-hearing SMS and door-knock outreach
- Negotiated move-out time and record sealing
- Habitability counterclaims where warranted
The Open Docket
Free, open-source tools that translate court procedure into plain language, generate correctly formatted filings, and text you before a deadline runs. Built with attorneys, reviewed by attorneys, and never a substitute for one.
- Deadline and hearing alerts by SMS
- Guided court form assembly
- Attorney review queue before filing
Debt & Records Clinics
Volume clinics attacking the two most common civil traps: default judgments in debt collection, and old records that block housing and employment long after the sentence ended.
- Default judgment vacatur
- Wage garnishment exemption claims
- Expungement and record-sealing drives
Rules Reform Lab
Research, model legislation, and testimony aimed at the cheapest fix available: making courts simpler and letting qualified non-lawyers do work that never required a law degree.
- Plain-language procedure redrafting
- Licensed paraprofessional expansion
- Default judgment safeguards and notice standards
Technology should give a person leverage, never a verdict.Our technology principle
Cheapest interventions,
highest leverage, first.
A single represented case costs money. A rule change that removes a procedural trap costs almost nothing and helps everyone who walks through the door afterward — forever. So we spend on direct services because people need help today, and we spend on rules because that is the only way the math ever closes.
Start here.
Right now.
Pick what's happening to you. You'll get the deadline that matters most, the first things to do today, and free places that can actually take your case.
This is legal information, not legal advice, and it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Deadlines vary by state and county — verify with your court or a local legal aid office.
What are you dealing with?
Choose a category above to see next steps.
Four things that help in almost every case.
- Do not ignore court papers. The most common way people lose is by not responding. A default judgment is often harder to undo than the original case was to fight.
- Show up. Even unprepared, even late, even without a lawyer. Appearing preserves options that vanish the moment you don't.
- Write down every date. Service date, answer deadline, hearing date. Put them on a calendar with alarms the day before and the week before.
- Keep everything in one place. Photograph every document, text, notice and receipt. Cases turn on records more often than on speeches.
Pick a lever
and pull it.
Money buys hours. Hours buy outcomes. And a phone call to a state legislator costs nothing and can outlast every dollar either of us will ever give.
What a gift funds.
Unit costs shown are planning estimates pending our first audited fiscal year; they will be replaced with verified figures in the annual report. Contributions to a 501(c)(3) are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.
Volunteer your hours
You don't need a law degree. Intake, translation, court accompaniment, data entry and outreach are the bottleneck more often than lawyering is.
- Attorneys: pro bono case placement
- Non-lawyers: intake, outreach, translation
- Engineers and designers: The Open Docket
Move your state
Right to counsel in eviction cases has passed in multiple states and cities because residents asked for it. Paraprofessional licensing passed the same way.
- Call your state legislator — script provided
- Testify at a bar or court rules hearing
- Submit a public comment on proposed rules
Tell what happened
Reform passes on stories with numbers attached. If you went through a case alone, your account — anonymized however you want — is evidence.
- Written or recorded intake
- Full anonymity available
- You approve any public use
One email a month.
Data, wins, next fights.
Nonpartisan
by necessity.
Due process is not a partisan asset. A person losing a home to a defective notice and a person losing a business to a procedural trap have the same complaint, and it is older than either party. We take positions on court rules and legal access. We do not take positions on candidates.
Evidence over volume
We cite sources, publish methodology, and say plainly when the evidence is observational rather than causal. A movement that inflates its numbers hands its opponents the argument.
Serve first, campaign second
Every advocacy claim we make should trace back to people we actually helped. If the direct services stop, the policy voice loses its standing.
Open by default
Our forms engine, training curricula and datasets are published under open licenses so other organizations can fork them instead of rebuilding them.
Where the money goes.
Our target allocation, published quarterly against actuals. Form 990 and audited financials are posted the day they're filed.
Targets shown for a 501(c)(3). Figures for the first fiscal year will replace these on filing.
We would rather be right than loud.House rule
Everything on this site
traces back to these.
- Legal Services Corporation, The Justice Gap: The Unmet Civil Legal Needs of Low-income Americans (2022), and the 2017 predecessor study.
- National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel — jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction eviction representation outcomes.
- City of Philadelphia Right to Counsel evaluations, FY2023 and FY2025.
- City of Boulder eviction dashboard, January 2025; Heartland Center for Jobs & Freedom, Kansas City (2024).
- Stanford Law School, Legal Innovation After Reform: Five Years of Data on Regulatory Change (2025); IAALS reporting on Arizona and Utah.