Advancing Advocacy, Access to Justice, and Learning Objectives Through Technology

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Session Type: Workshop Programs

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The COVID-19 pandemic has forced innovative uses of technology to provide services and engage with the judicial system and human rights stakeholders. Technology can overcome geographic barriers; serve as a tool for direct empowerment; aggregate, compare and communicate public policy responses; and allow marginalized and underrepresented communities to access information and tools for exercising their rights. This workshop will explore new uses of technology to deliver services, defend human rights, monitor public policies, facilitate access to justice, resolve conflict, facilitate community outreach and support, widely diffuse laws and policies, enhance advocacy, promote accountability, and enhance civil society engagement. In addition to facilitating service and advocacy objectives, using technology in our clinics can achieve learning objectives such as counseling and interviewing, policy analysis, and legal research in new ways.

Presenters will discuss case studies from their clinics that illustrate the use of technology to facilitate learning and service goals. These include:
• Serving as neutral mediators within a court-connected system affecting thousands of pro se litigants from underserved communities;
• Rapidly automating court processes, providing pro se litigants remote, user-friendly, step-by-step guidance in areas such as domestic violence protection orders and emergency housing needs;
• Advising pro se asylum-seekers on how to protect their rights in immigration court and access benefits under a class action;
• Advancing legal empowerment through the support of tech-enabled monitoring by Indigenous partners in Guyana of illegal mining on their ancestral territories and expansion into monitoring water rights;
• Identifying, analyzing, and mapping positive human rights responses by States to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Participants will then discuss how to integrate technology while also addressing ethical challenges, developing core lawyering skills, overcoming inequities in access to technology, and providing supervision. Participants will then share the successes, challenges, and strategies they identified to incorporate technology into their clinical projects in new ways.