Medical-Legal Partnership as a Model for Access to Justice

As part of Stanford Law Review‘s 2023 Symposium on Access to Justice, this Essay explains how medical-legal partnerships–community-based programs that embed lawyers within healthcare teams–offer a promising model to address our country’s justice gap. By using trusted institutions to connect people to the resources they need and embracing a bottom-up “patients-to-policy” approach, medical legal partnerships demonstrate how interdisciplinary collaborations can effect transformative change and advance substantive justice.