Abstract

To assist courts, the National Center for State Courts, in partnership with the Illinois Institute of Technology's Institute of Design and the Chicago-Kent College of Law, launched a research project to examine court processes and recommend modifications to eliminate or reduce procedural barriers to access for self-represented litigants. The projects had three major tasks: (1) to identify major barriers to access to justice that self-represented litigants encounter due to court procedures and administrative requirements; (2) to employ system design methodology to redesign court processes to remove those barriers, and (3) to translate the conceptual model for redesigned court system into an Internet-based prototype for implementation in the courts.

This article first briefly describes the project methodology and characteristics of the observation sites, and then summarizes the conclusions and several of the recommendations from the first two tasks which were completed in December 2000 and May 2001, respectively. Next, we provide a rather detailed explanation of the information gathering and system design work of the various student/faculty teams. In the system design discussion that follows, we will focus most of our attention on the development and refinements of new ideas. A book-length presentation of the design process, including more detail for Steps 3, 4, and 5 in the process, is set out in the Access to Justice report available both in print and on the web. Task 3, the creation of an Internet-based prototype, was still in progress in May 2002 as the final editing of this article was completed. In a later article the prototype that was constructed in the third task will be presented and discussed.

This abstract has been taken from the authors' introduction.

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2002

Publication Information

52 Syracuse University Law Review 1017-1047 (2002)

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