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Jamila Michener and Mallory E. Sorelle, "Uncivil Democracy: How Access to Justice Shapes Political Power" (Princeton UP, 2026)
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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C
Hi, I'm Ursula Hackett of the New Books Network. Today, I'm delighted to speak with Jamila Michener and Mallory Sorrell, the author Uncivil How Access to Justice Shapes Political Power, which was published by Princeton University Press in 2026. Jamila and Mallory, welcome to the show.
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B
Thanks so much. We're delighted to be here.
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D
Yeah, I'm excited for this conversation.
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C
Well, I'm tremendously excited, too, because I have enjoyed this book so, so much. It is absolutely beautifully written. It is rich and it is intensely human, and it accomplishes that extraordinary thing which we see so rarely of quantitative political meeting the stories, the everyday experiences of people who are struggling and trying to negotiate these civil legal processes with respect to housing issues across the United States. So you've got this amazing selection of data. You have got interviews, you have got national survey data, you've got data sets which you're analyzing, and you're bringing them together in this wonderful package. And I'm just so, so excited to talk to you about it. So I wonder, Jamila, would you start us off by telling us a little bit about the origin story for uncivil democracy? How did this book come about?
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D
Sure. You know, I am so sorry that Mallory's going to have to hear this for what is probably the hundredth time. And we have parallel but distinct origin stories. So for me, when I was an undergraduate too many years ago for me to name, because it would betray my age, I really thought that I wanted to be a lawyer. And that was largely, probably a function of the fact that I grew up in a working class family where there weren't really there weren't many people who had kind of professional careers. And I didn't know what the options were, but lawyers seemed like a fair enough one. And I had a lot of interest in poverty and racial inequality Again, largely because I grew up in working class and low income communities of color in New York City. And I saw poverty and racial inequality and I experienced it in my life. And so I thought, oh, I can be a lawyer that represents low income people. And so I did an internship the summer of my junior year at a local law firm in the neighborhood where I grew up, near the neighborhood where I grew up in Queens, New York. And it was called Queens Legal Services. And they represented low income clients in cases involving housing issues like eviction, but also all sorts of other things. People lost their public benefits when they shouldn't have lost them. And people who were women who were, you know, being harassed by their bosses. I mean, just a really wide range of civil legal issues, lots of debt cases, your credit card company is bringing you to court, and so forth. And I was really struck by that experience because the need was dramatically bigger than the lawyers could supply. Right. So there were a lot of people coming into that office with really intense problems that were going to alter their life in significant ways. And they just didn't have the capacity to represent them. And even when they were represented, there were pretty limited things that could happen that could be done. Now, don't get me wrong, those attorneys are really, I say this all the time. They were doing God's work. And even as a college student, I knew people are coming here in the most vulnerable and desperate situations and these attorneys are finding whatever ways they can find to help them. At the same time, I recognized how limited the pathways for that were. And I would say to the attorneys, but why are so many people being evicted? And why are these problems, like, as intense as they are? There's no way you could meet the scale of the problem. So like, why not look at the source of the problem? And the attorneys very kindly said, we just don't do that. And that was an important moment for me to recognize this is not the work that I want to do going forward. It's important work. But I want to think about these systems, these structures, these processes that, that people are vulnerable to and why they're working the way they are. So that was way back when I was a junior in college. And that really stuck with me when I started in political science. I didn't know where that fit into our discipline. And I didn't know how to write a dissertation or write research about the topic. So I held onto it, but I didn't pursue it for a long time. And once I was, I saw like tenure on the horizon and I knew like My academic research career was pretty solid. That was the first thing that I wanted to do, is to pursue the project that I had gotten the germ of way back when I was in college.
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C
Let's talk a bit about those needs that you describe here, Jamila, because we've got in this book this really eloquent account of the gaps between the sort of demand for representation, the supply of that representation within these systems, and these overwhelming needs. And you describe what you call a justice gap. I wonder, Mallory, could you describe for us, you know, what is the justice gap? What is it? How does it arise? What is this sort of central, central idea?
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B
So if we think of the fact that about 250 million Americans every year experience at least one, what we might think of as a civil legal problem. So problems with housing, with debt collection, these can be problems related to family law, also immigration, we're seeing a lot of that right now in the news. Now, not all of those problems rise to the level of needing to go to court, but many of them. And when we think about low income folks, particularly in the US anywhere between about 75, 80% of low income Americans are going to have at least one of those civil legal problems every year. And among the ones that finally make it into a courtroom, the vast majority of low income litigants in particular are going into those spaces with either with no access to legal representation or with insufficient access. So if we think about in the criminal context, we know there's a constitutional right to an attorney, but no such guarantee exists on the civil legal side. And so what ends up happening is the overwhelming majority of low income clients who are often brought into the courts by debt collectors, credit card companies, landlords, other economically powerful actors, they're showing up alone without much assistance in navigating those processes. And as you can imagine, that doesn't generally turn in their favor. And so that's what we, when we talk about the justice gap, that's what we're talking about is that disconnect between the amount of legal representation that might be necessary to make sure that every person who is going through the civil legal process has access to counsel in some way versus what, what people actually have access to in the world, and
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C
that access to justice, that justice gap that you described there, Mallory, that's an intensely racialized one. And this is obviously a central theme of this book. So, Jameela, would you describe that racialization to us? You know, how exactly is it that access to civil justice in the United States is so racialized?
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D
Yeah, I mean, There are a few different pathways through which that ends up happening. You know, the most kind of simple and straightforward way to think about it is that the problems that are driving people to end up in kind of legal situations or situations that could be understood as legal, whether it means you're getting evicted from your home or you're living in substandard conditions, or you're facing off against a creditor because you, you owe some kind of debt, those kinds of problems are connected to, you know, inequalities that are racialized. Right. So we know that you're more likely to be living in precarious housing as a kind of black or Latina woman in the U.S. right. And you're more likely to have a higher housing cost burden, which means that you can, you're more likely to end up in a situation where you're getting evicted and you find yourself in housing court. And along very similar lines in terms of who's likely to have, you know, less income, less wealth, more limited access to resources. These are the very same people who then end up in situations, legal situations, that reflect that limited access to resource. And they're also the very people who cannot afford a private attorney. So they end up in need of legal representation that they, that they can't have. Right. There's an. They can't have. In the context of a system where legal representation for low income people is very limited, there's a layer above that or beneath that, depending on how you think about it, as well, which has to do with the, the, it's, it's not just a sort of demographic reality that black and Latina and people in the United States have lower income and so they end up more likely to be in these situations. It's also that oftentimes there is sort of direct racism or discrimination that these folks are facing. Right. And we've seen this in some qualitative accounts, for example, of, of black women facing eviction, which is just that the way that people who are at the margins of our society in this way and people who are, are stereotyped and misunderstood and often mistreated. You know, if you're a landlord, you're, you're maybe more likely to do some things you shouldn't be doing or you're going to give less, you're going to use your discretion in more ways that are discriminatory. I mean, you're going to treat this black woman who you could potentially evict, differently than you might if it were a white woman who you could potentially evict. So either because of sort of direct racial discrimination or racism or the kind of more structural features of our political economy that disproportionately expose and make vulnerable people of color to kind of legally justiceable processes, processes where they end up in the crosshairs of the law. For those reasons and others, but primarily those, we end up seeing really different outcomes in terms of the justice gap with respect to where people are located racially in our, in the racial hierarchy of our kind of political economic structures.
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C
And of course, all of these problems, the central focus of your book is on housing, of course, but of course, and as Mallory has already referred to this, these problems are intertwined with so many other social issues, whether that's about childcare or education or debt or mental health care, labor protections, lead, sort of simple things like, things like lead poisoning, you know, which you do refer to in your book. You know, you're talking about these, these children that are living in houses that are completely substandard that is affecting their development. And also I think the intertwined nature of some of these issues coming out in your discussion of the timing of some of the bills that you're. You're looking at referring to civil legal protections as well. So whether that's during the, the welfare reform era of the mid-1990s or whether that's during the healthcare push in 2010, I'm just wondering, Mallory, whether you could tease out some of those, the connections between the central issue of housing and all of these other social issues that of course, bear upon these questions of civil justice.
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B
Absolutely, because they are so interconnected, I think, both obviously in the lives of the people whose stories we are telling in this book. And I think also in the way Jamila and I both came to this work, she mentioned her time at Queen's Legal Services, and I similarly spent some time working after college at the National Consumer Law center, which is an organization that does policy advocacy work and training of consumer attorneys. And they work primarily in the space of low income consumer finance. So think of debt collection, subprime lending, all of those kinds of questions. And in that space, I spent a lot of time in debt collection courts in Massachusetts observing these proceedings. And, you know, it would be person after person coming in with some amount of outstanding debt. They're there on their own, they don't have any legal help. And on the other, you know, side of the aisle is a major credit card company, right. Or a major debt collection company and their attorneys. And I just remember watching and thinking, you know, this feels so unequal and so structurally unequal, because when you look at who's in those courtrooms, you can't help but notice the patterns of the groups who are in those courtrooms and who's not in those courtrooms. And those issues are really intertwined, right? So if you experience some sort of health care emergency and you don't have health insurance through work and you find yourself in a dispute, or maybe you don't have sufficient health insurance, you find yourself with a dispute over your billing for whatever medical procedure you had, well, that goes through the civil courts.
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And then if you find yourself unable
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B
to pay that and you go into medical debt, well, debt collection for that can go through the civil courts. If in the process of then sort of racking up debts and trying to pay off your bills, you fall behind on your rent and you get evicted, and that goes through the civil courts, Right. So these issues compound in so many, I think, really critical and important ways. And when policymakers have looked at these different types of problems and ways that they might solve them, generally the answer is to try and give people access to counsel, often in lieu of trying to solve the underlying structural problem that drives people to the courts in the first place. But one of the things that I think is really striking about the way policymakers approach this is there are some problems for which I think policymakers more or less seem to be on the same page that we ought to try and help people get representation for, or at least some types of people get representation for. So, for example, if you're being evicted and policymakers view you as a deserving type of individual who's there through no fault of your own, then we might like to make sure you have an attorney.
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E
But there are plenty of other things
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B
that drive people into the civil legal system that often put them in direct conflict with the state itself. So, for example, if your civil legal problems hinge on a dispute over access to public benefits.
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D
Right.
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That raises some thornier questions. Does the government want to fund attorneys to support clients who are challenging the government? And so all through this sort of trajectory of policymakers trying to think about whether to expand and in what ways to expand access to civil legal counsel, you get these really thorny issues because of the overlapping nature of the problems and the people on the other side of those problems, and who policymakers think are worth helping and in what circumstances they're worth helping.
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C
Let's think a bit about some of these people who are enmeshed in these many challenges that you're laying out here, Mallory. And in Particular, I mean, one thing I would like to just explore with you a bit is the role of gender here. Because in your surveys of people thinking about, you know, who is experiencing these specific civil legal problems, I was really struck that actually being a woman is associated with a lower chance of experiencing certain specific civil legal problems. But of course, also the focus of this book here is upon largely black women and their male landlords. And there's so many ways in which gender really comes through the sort of gendered injustices. Things like. And I mean, there's just extraordinary stories here. It's absolutely eye popping to read and about people, landlords hitting on tenants, coming to flirt with those tenants, sending around mail, repairmen at times where only a sort of a teenage daughter is at home. And then, you know, I just wondered if you could tell us, Jamila, a little bit more about the role of gender in terms of those experiences of civil legal problems.
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D
Absolutely. And this is one of the reasons why we take the approach that we do in the book of kind of exploring multiple methods, Right. So when we survey people across the landscape, right? So this could be any kind of civil legal problem. It might be debt, it might be eviction, it might be immigration, it might be a family issue. You know, we might see aggregate patterns that really mask some of these really nuanced, experiential, you know, dimensions that you don't get unless you talk to people, Right. And, and because we were focusing on housing in the book, and we did that for a couple of different reasons, like because of our own interests, but also because you just can't focus on everything because this realm is just too, too massive. And we would have had to write either a tome that was never ending, we'd still be working on it five, 10 years now, or multiple books. And this is not a series, although people have asked. And so we decided to focus on one area, and that does happen to be an area where women are particularly vulnerable to predation. And so that really comes out in the book when we're talking to people about their experiences with housing. And, you know, women are not only vulnerable in the context of housing because they might struggle to pay their rent, right? But they're vulnerable because you have to engage a particular set of actors in the context of housing. You have a landlord, you have property managers, you have people who can come into your life in direct, physical ways. They can show up at the door, right? They, they meet you when you're filling out your application. They have to come physically to your home when you have Some kind of a problem that needs to be fixed or resolved. And every one of those points of interaction creates an opportunity for some kind of predation or harm to be perpetrated against women. Right. And unfortunately, we live in a society where there's a kind of political economy of harming women and people who have more economic power and who are able to wield material resources as a threat. All right. Are more able to then to do that. Right. And that's exactly what we see in these stories, that women who are on the kind of economic margins and therefore are more vulnerable to exploitation. It turns out that people who have economic power, like landlords or property managers, they leverage that and they do actually exploit these women. And so we wanted to be really intentional about including that element of those stories because it is a major facet of how many women are experiencing the kinds of problems that drive them into the civil legal system and might prevent them from fully accessing the protections that that system has to offer. Right. Like do you want to show up at court against your landlord if you have to worry about retaliation or abuse? So there get to be all of these dynamics that we can't fully flesh out in the book. But we do try to surface enough for people to get a sense of the texture of experiences at play here.
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C
And it's fascinating to think about the experiences of these. You call them race, gendered class, subjugated community. I thought that's a really powerful phrase. And I was thinking about this in comparative context because I come from the uk. I mean, we have our own challenges with respect to people accessing legal aid and being able to navigate through the legal system. I was, I. There's been some research that shows that, you know, people, 42% of people in the UK in 2024 on low incomes had no legal assistance or representation in court. And that is a. There is a huge disparity between those in low incomes and higher incomes in terms of their access to the courts. Of course, people who are disabled, people who are from minority ethnic groups, migrants and asylum seekers, you know, these are all groups of people that really struggle, I think, to access our, our own legal system and also to, you know, and suffer from perhaps some of the sort of barriers and perhaps limited provision as well. And I'm just wondering, I mean, clearly, Mallory, this is an extraordinary contribution to American political economy and will be read for many, many years and become an absolute touchstone in this field. And I just wondered whether you. There is a, there is any cross national insight we can gleam from what's going on in the United States and whether you thought about other systems in which these sorts of inequalities might arise,
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E
this is a really great question. So in the book, of course, we focus on the US As a case. Primarily, we do look at some comparisons between the US and other countries when it comes to providing access to justice. So for example, when we compare the United States to other high income countries, the US Ranks near the bottom for measures of access to civil legal services, affordability of those services, and also discrimination within the civil legal system. There are some ways in which the US Case is probably distinctive from comparative, from other comparative cases, or potentially travels best to countries with similar underlying social policy and legal institutions. So, for example, one of the reasons that we see so many civil cases flow through the legal system in the US is because of some pretty fundamental underlying inadequacies in our social safety net that channel those needs into the civil legal system. So obviously that might look different in a country that has a more robust system of social welfare protections. Similarly, most civil legal representation, particularly for low income folks in the US is based on what we might think of as a staff model. So what that means is most legal service providers are primarily legal service providers. So they are staffed organizations. Sometimes it's things like law clinics or joint civil and criminal efforts. But that contrasts with what is essentially a fee for service model that many countries use where governments will subsidize private attorneys to assist, essentially just take on civil legal cases sort of as they're able. So that's another, another difference. So some of our findings might travel best to settings that look most like the US on the other hand, I think there are many of our conclusions that probably travel pretty well. So for example, the role of access to counsel, irrespective of how you get it, in essentially smoothing the process of navigating the legal system and potentially increasing a sense of procedural justice, there's no reason to think that that wouldn't travel, I think, outside of the US context. Similarly, there are limitations to that, no matter the context, right. For changing some of those underlying inequalities that channel needs into the civil legal system in the first instance. And the role that collective organizing might play to help reduce some of those sort of first order needs to ultimately reduce the need for such a robust civil legal system in the first place.
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C
And I suppose one of the key elements of that distinctiveness is the fact that you've got a federal system, right? And you've got this extraordinary variation which you document so well in the book between different states and indeed different localities in terms of people's ability to access civil legal justice. And I wonder, Jamila, whether you could just give us a flavor of some of that variation. I mean, clearly the focus in the book is on some of the places where it's very difficult for people to access justice. I wonder whether you could reflect on some of the differences between the places and states where things are done relatively well as opposed to relatively poorly.
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D
Yeah, no, I think that's. That's a good question. And I also, you know, I think we. The. The place that this be. The way that this became the most clear to me was by actually, like, sitting in courtrooms and watching what unfolded there. And we did that all over the country, and the differences were pretty dramatic. And, you know, another way that we got at this was by talking to people who had experiences in different kinds of contexts and could talk about different. They were right. So we have, you know, in one of our chapters, someone who we call Leo, who talks about the difference between when he lived in the south versus moving to Colorado versus, you know, and. And could really adeptly explain, like, how different it is in different places. And so these are not, like, minute differences. And there are a few things that, you know when you're there. So, for example, I did some observation in Atlanta. Well, not even Atlanta and Georgia, but in the kind of greater. Greater Atlanta metro area, and also did a lot in New York City. And those are really different places. I mean, when you walk into the court and you sit in those places, if you sit in an eviction court in Fulton county in Atlanta, and you sit in one in Queens county in New York City, if you're just sitting there looking around, it looks very similar, right? It's mostly black and brown women who are facing eviction and who are waiting for a judge to adjudicate their case. Many of them, you know, when I first started to do this work, didn't have attorneys in either places. As time went on, because New York City has passed the right to counsel legislation in 2017, more and more of the observation that I was doing in New York City involved people who did have representation, right? So that was one big difference between the places. And with my field work in Georgia, I went back with five years in between. So I wanted to see, like, is anything changing, right? If I show up here in 2019 and then I are in, you know, 2018 and then I show up again in 2024, 2025, is anything going to be different? And it's not really different, Right. And there's scant attorneys, and there are some policy pieces that this links to. So in Georgia, for example, because of some of the ways their laws are structured, they really encourage arbitration. So when you're observing there, the judges will often say, well, why don't you go into the hallway and see if you can work something out with the attorney? Now, we know that that really puts unrepresented tenants at a disadvantage. This attorney is someone whose literal job is to negotiate and to communicate around negotiating and to get the most that they can get for their client. And judges are saying, now, go in the hallway, figure something out with the landlord. And then tenants are coming back in having agreed to these deals that are wild, like these payment schedules. And then what happens if you don't pay? And you're just sitting there listening like, how is this even okay? And. But there's a preference for arbitration there, and that's what the judges do. And there are very few attorneys to help on the tenant side. And, you know, I see almost no. Or I didn't. I don't think I ever saw once a judge in New York City or in New York State say, why don't you go out in the hallway and come up with your own deal with the. With the landlord, right, with the landlord's attorney. They're just not doing that. And instead they're saying, you don't have an attorney here today. Why don't we adjourn, find an attorney. Here are the places you can go and get free civil legal representation. Come back in two weeks when you're represented. And I saw cases get adjourned three, four times because the judges were like, we can't do this unless you have an attorney. It's not going to be fair to you. Whereas in Georgia, that's not anywhere on the radar. It's like, go have an unfair negotiation with the landlord. And that's just one example. And it. It links to the underlying laws in those places. It also links to the norms in the legal environments that are a reflection of those laws. But ultimately, what it maps to is dramatically different experiences and honestly, life chances for the people who live in these places.
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C
One thing that really struck me about what you just said there, Jamila, is the continuities over the time period that you were conducting this research that you see in these different localities and jurisdictions. And, I mean, one thing, I suppose that another reason why I hugely admire what you've done here is that you were collecting a lot of this data over a really challenging time period where the pandemic was raging. Presumably a lot of these procedures had to go online. And that brings its own set of challenges, whether that's in terms of the problems that people are facing, where people are struggling with these housing situations, and then there's additional issue of potentially having to go out and expose themselves to the virus, or whether that's in terms of how people access justice. So, you know, they are being directed to these zoom rooms and then the zoom cones change and so people can't access the hearing. And so then they get evicted. And it's just, it's just absolutely appalling and shocking to read these stories in your work. And I wondered, Mallory, if you could reflect upon that process of, you know, create gathering this data during a time of pandemic and also how far some of the findings that you have, you know, that relate to this period of, you know, global, global pandemic and how that relates to some of the findings that you had about how people can access justice and whether those things carry over to the sort of post pandemic world.
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E
I think there are two ways of thinking about this question. So one, of course, is substantive. Is there something about doing research for this book during the pandemic that changed our substantive findings? And the other is process based. Was there something about doing this research during the pandemic that changed how we went about that work? So with respect to the first, you know, we started the sort of interview and ethnography piece of this project before the pandemic. We continued it during the pandemic and of course after the worst effects of the pandemic. And so what I would say is, while there were maybe different manifestations of the problems people experienced, both in terms of some of the civil legal problems, but also experience navigating the courts. So, for example, you know, we use the example of someone we call Tamara in the book who was supposed to be showing up for an eviction hearing via Zoom.
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B
She was given
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E
the wrong link to the Zoom room. When she didn't show up in the room they actually held the hearing in, it was registered as a default judgment and she was going to be evicted.
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B
Right.
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E
That's a sort of pandemic specific manifestation of problems with the civil legal system. So while we might think of them as in some ways differences in kind, I would not say they were differences in degree. So, for example, the same types of problems still occur both prior to and after the pandemic. A great example of that happens in Detroit, where the mail system has been Notoriously unreliable. So when the courts send out notices about when to appear for eviction hearings, many people simply aren't getting the notices in the mail before their hearings. So they don't know to show up, they get a default judgment registered against them and they're evicted from their houses.
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D
Right.
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E
So again, those are very similar types of experiences that persist both sort of during, in the middle of and after the pandemic. There's another way in which I think the pandemic shaped our research process. So obviously during the pandemic there was, at least in theory, a moratorium on evictions. We know that didn't actually happen in practice, but court was held quite differently.
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B
Right.
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E
A lot of courts moved to Zoom and things of that nature. What that allowed us to do during the pandemic was to focus our attention more on speaking, to interviewing and observing tenant organizing, which we had identified through some of our earlier work as a really important piece of this puzzle. And so during the pandemic, we were able to sort of systematically identify tenant groups that were operating across the country, recruit participants from those groups to interview, hold those interviews over Zoom. And also many of the tenant groups themselves were holding their meetings via Zoom. So that offered an opportunity for sort of Zoom based ethnography during the pandemic. So I'd say that's how our work was shaped differently by the pandemic.
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- [36:11]
C
Experian so let's think a bit more about the effects or what you expected the effects to be of these problems that people are facing and the challenges that they experience with the system that the effects that they have on those people. And of course, you're rooting your work in this policy feedback literature, which we all know well, which I think is a really powerful frame. And I think one of the things that's really striking about this book is the way in which you're very carefully identifying these sort of policy feedback loops and the kind of mobilizing or demobilizing effects of, you know, positive or negative experiences with the system. And I was reflecting on that because you have this juxtaposition of the case of civil justice with two other cases. So you've got Social Security, where of course we know this is a sort of system that builds political kind of efficacy, you know, that people that has made it resistant to scaling that program down and given it a really sort of powerful basis. And then on the other hand, and of course this is your particular area of expertise, Mallory, the sort of consumer financial protections where you're sort of saying, okay, so if you're obscuring the role of government, you're kind of demobilizing people. There's that kind of feedback loop. And I suppose what's striking to me is that in some ways both of, both of those instances are kind of negative feedback loops in the sense that they are self regulating sort of stabilizing mechanisms that produce a sort of homeostasis, right. That on the one hand a high level of benefits, on the other a lower level maybe of benefits, but that they're both kind of got that negative feedback effect approach. And I'm just wondering what you think, Jamila, it would take to kind of push. Well, how where you think civil justice fits between these two examples, but also what you think it would take and Mallory mentioned tenant organizations, what it would take to push that into a positive feedback loop where you've got real momentum for change.
- [38:08]
D
Yeah, I love this part, especially because it allows the kind of arc of the book to move towards possibility, which I will say where we started, you know, especially because I started from this experience that was very real very early in my life, essentially watching people suffer without an adequate level of response to kind of meet their need. And so I do think I had a sort of a deficit story in mind at the start of this. And certainly what I think of as like a negative feedback process in terms of experiences with the courts and kind of experiences as a denizen, as a member of a political community. And I thought going in that the nature of people's experiences both with the courts and with legal services was going to erode their democratic citizenship, was going to make it such that they were alienated from, and not and less fully incorporated into the polity in any number of ways in terms of their attitudes, in terms of their behavior politically. And so that is what I came in expecting. And we do see some of that both in our qualitative data and in our quantitative data. But the story is much more complicated than that. And on the one hand, what we find is that having an attorney mitigates that negative feedback effect, that negative feedback process. Because now, while you might have been embedded and enmeshed in a process that is otherwise, you know, harmful to you materially, but also in terms of the nature of your relationship with an understanding of the government that you, once you're not alone in that anymore, once you have someone who can come in as an intermediary and actually provide you with some protection, it sort of mitigates the erosion of your, of your citizenship in that way, in a positive way. And it's not a kind of like panacea that fixes everything. But when we invest resources in giving people protection in the face of otherwise harmful systems, we are investing resources in democracy and in their ability to be incorporated into that democracy. And so that's great, but we didn't stop there, and I'm glad that we didn't. And in part we didn't stop there because we saw tenant organizers in courts and we saw them operating in these spaces and we were like, wait, maybe there's something even more than simply mitigating the harms that courts are creating or generating in people's lives. And it's great that legal services, attorneys or legal representation can play that role in mitigating, but maybe there's even more affirmative possibilities. And that is what we saw when we saw that people's legal problems, when they bring them into engagement with community based organizing and organizations that actually help them to stop thinking about these legal problems as individual problems, but to understand the collective and the structural nature of those problems, and then to engage in kind of collective action and organizing with other people who are experiencing similar problems that opens up a whole different horizon of possibility. And now it's not just that we're minimizing the harm that comes from being processed through courts that are not that are, that are honestly aren't respecting you and aren't meeting your needs, but we're actually creating the opportunity to build your power. Right. And, and that I think is important in the larger scheme of the policy feedback literature because I think something that sometimes happens in that literature is we focus on individual level effects. This person has Social Security, this person has Medicaid, this person has an experience with debt, and so on and so forth. And I've done that in my work. So it's not a criticism, it's just an observation that we emphasize these individual level relationships. But what we do in the book is we say these feedback processes can be shaped by collective organizing and processes that bring us much closer to what I think the core ethos of democracy is. Right. And it was really the only way that writing this book didn't become deeply depressing considering the kind of the nature and the sobering nature of the problems that the people in the book that we highlight are facing. The thing that kept us motivated and excited and inspired in the book was seeing how much collective organizing played a role.
- [43:01]
C
And it's interesting to reflect upon the fact that it's not just something that we as political scientists are doing, that kind of individualizing process, but actually it's something that the system does in individualizing through this legal process. Even judges sort of seeing case after case that's clearly representing some sort of broader pattern. Sometimes even the same landlord. But they're kind of individualizing the solution. They're individualizing the problem in a way that kind of impedes that collective, that sense of the collective that you're describing, Jamila. And I wonder if we could kind of reflect on that individualizing versus collectivizing sort of incentives. Because it seems to me that in thinking about community organizing and the way that you're, you're doing so imaginatively and so powerfully, I think the whole concern is that this isn't a top down process. It's very much a bottom up process that is, that is rooted in that kind of specificity that is rooted in specific places and individual problems. So in a funny way, there's sort of this within this idea of communal organizing and communality. It's not a top down structure or formula. It is rooted in part in individuality because it's rooted the individual quality of some of those places and problems that they're seeking to address. So I wonder if we could. Could we tease out that kind of that. That connection, Mallory, for us.
- [44:22]
E
I love that you notice this tension in the book between the individual and the collective or community dimension. It's a thread that really runs through the entire book. And it's exemplified actually by the story we start the book with, which is the story of Josephine, who is a woman renting an apartment in Harlem, New York. She's lived in the same building for a long time and sees her building bought out by sort of corporate landlords who own a lot of properties across the city. And after this new landlord takes over, the. The building begins to deteriorate in some really heartbreaking ways. Josephine details a lot of those, but one particular example she gives us is of the sewage backing up through the toilet in her apartment. And when this happens, Josephine has had enough experiences with the new landlords to know they're not going to fix it in any sort of timely manner. And so Josephine essentially reaches out to landlords and says, look, I'm going to hire a plumber. I'm going to pay for them to fix this now. And then you're going to reimburse me, which is something that's allowed by the lease. And so she does that. And in order to get that reimbursed, she has to take her landlord to court, and she gets access to an attorney through legal services to help her do that. And she's successful. She gets the landlord to reimburse her. Now, the bill is less than $200, but that still feels like a victory to Josephine, but it's an individual victory, and Josephine understands that. She knows that she's only solving this one problem and only for herself. And she says, that's not enough. You know, I was brought up to pay attention to the community, and I know that this one experience, this one positive experience of the courts is not solving the community's larger problems with this landlord. And so Josephine becomes connected to and involved with tenant organizing for tenants across the city who live in buildings owned by the same landlord. And so Josephine is exemplifying this tension between solving individual problems through the courts versus turning to collective organizing when that simply isn't enough. Right. This traces to the whole historical argument of the book as well. We see policymakers both sort of progressive and more conservative proponents of providing federal funding to access civil legal services for low income folks cite these different tensions. So progressive supporters saw providing access to counsel as a way to actually empower marginalized groups as a community, they saw things like class actions, appellate legislation as opportunities to sort of empower low income folks as a class that could rebalance the scales of political economy. On the other side of the aisle, there were many conservative policymakers who actually viewed access to council as a way to channel growing collective rage among many groups sort of into these individual, what they referred to as the civilizing mechanism of the courts. So the same policy solution is framed
- [47:36]
B
in very different ways.
- [47:37]
E
One as a way to build collective power, the other as a way to promote individual solutions to prevent broader structural change. And tenant groups grapple with the same debate. Right. How is it that we balance solving our members real individual, concrete legal needs? Right. How do we keep a roof over their heads when they're being evicted versus making enough space for the broader goal of collective power building?
- [48:04]
B
Right.
- [48:04]
E
How do we not become too consumed with that individualizing legal process? And so that's a tension that runs through the entire book and is really central to this story of, of how access to justice is actually achieved in
- [48:17]
C
the US and it's really powerfully expressed, I think, in the juxtaposition that you both make between kind of these procedural justice visions of political and economic power and then a kind of structural transformative vision that you've both been describing.
- [48:34]
D
And
- [48:37]
C
final question for you both, and it picks up, I think, on, on something that Jamila said at the very beginning there, which is that people have been asking you about whether this is a series. God, I hope this is a series. And I'm just wondering, Jamila, whether you could speak to what's next for you? Are you, are you, you know, you could work more in this space. Are there, what other projects have you got on the go at the moment?
- [48:57]
D
Oh, I love that. And I, you know, I wouldn't say it's a series, but I'll definitely be working in this space. So right now I'm working on a book that really is a kind of comparative exploration of the kind of political economy of grassroots power. And I'm. One of the kind of pillars that I will focus on is tenant organizing and the other is healthcare organizing. These are kind of two spaces I've lived a lot of my career in. And they're actually two spaces where trying to build grassroots power to affect structural changes is really hard and also where the efforts and the processes for doing so are really different because the actors that play are different. The kind of structural incentives in terms of where profit is coming from and who current, what elite power dynamics look like. And such are also really different and so understanding in these very different spaces, how is it that ordinary people on the ground who are suffering a variety of harms, organizing and building their power to try to create change. And so it's kind of a comparative case study of that. And so it will build on the themes that Mallory and I kind of waded into in this book, but I think is going to go much deeper on the organizing front while retaining this connection to kind of political economy and the importance of how it structures people's lives.
- [50:36]
E
Wonderful.
- [50:37]
C
Mallory, same question to you. What's next?
- [50:39]
E
This is a really great question. So in the book, of course, we focus on the US As a case. Primarily, we do look at some comparisons between the US and other countries when it comes to providing access to justice. So for example, when we compare the United States to other high income countries, the US Ranks near the bottom for measures of access to civil legal services, affordability of those services, and also discrimination within the civil legal system. There are some ways in which the US case is probably distinctive from comparative, from other comparative cases, or potentially travels best to countries with similar underlying social policy and legal institutions. So, for example, one of the reasons that we see so many civil cases flow through the legal system in the US is because of some pretty fundamental underlying inadequacies in our social safety net that channel those needs into the civil legal system. So obviously that might look different in a country that has a more robust system of social welfare protections. Similarly, most civil legal representation, particularly for low income folks in the US is based on what we might think of as a staff model. So what that means is most legal service providers are primarily legal service providers. So they are staffed organizations. Sometimes it's things like law clinics or joint civil and criminal efforts. But that contrasts with what is essentially a fee for service model that many countries use where governments will subsidize private attorneys to assist, essentially just take on civil legal cases sort of as they're able. So that's another, another difference. So some of our findings might travel best to settings that look most like the US on the other hand, I think there are many of our conclusions that probably travel pretty well. So for example, the role of access to counsel, irrespective of how you get it in essentially smoothing the process of navigating the legal system and potentially increasing a sense of procedural justice, there's no reason to think that that wouldn't travel, I think, outside of the US Context. Similarly, there are limitations to that, no matter the context. Right. For changing some of those underlying inequalities that channel needs into the civil legal system in the first instance, and the role that collective organizing might play to help reduce some of those sort of first order needs to ultimately reduce the need for such a robust civil legal system in the first place.
- [53:25]
D
We are not done. Mallory. Can't get rid of me. One little book isn't enough to get rid of me.
- [53:33]
C
That is just music to my ears, guys. I'm delighted. It really has been such a pleasure to speak to you both about this wonderful, wonderful book. For those of you listening, the title is Uncivil How Access to Justice Shapes Political Power. Jameela, Mallory, it's been a great pleasure.
- [53:51]
D
Thank you. This has been a great conversation.