The Challenges of Calculating the Benefits of Providing Access to Legal Services

This essay explores how policymakers and other public-interested actors have empirically calculated the benefits of providing low-income access to legal services in the past, and how they might improve upon existing methods going forward. The author reviews, criticizes, and tries to build on two major civil justice needs studies, one published by the Legal Services Corporation in 2005 and the other by the American Bar Association in 1994. The author also briefly criticizes assertions that the public provision f services is necessarily counterproductive.