By The Center for Justice Innovation

In May 2024, the New York State Unified Court System, with the Center for Justice Innovation (the Center), and in partnership with the Office of the Governor of the State of New York, launched the Family Justice Initiative: Court and Community Collaboration (FJI or the Initiative). Building on the reports and analyses that have documented statewide challenges across all case types in Family Court to date, the Initiative seeks to forge a fair, equitable, and sustainable path forward for the Court and its system partners to better serve all New Yorkers. The Initiative is solutions-focused, prioritizes areas for improvement, identifies promising programs, and explores new ideas to strengthen families, reduce unnecessary system involvement, and break intergenerational cycles of trauma. The Center’s role is to support a strategic planning process to develop a broad vision for what makes an effective family-serving system, as well as a comprehensive plan to support that vision. The goal for the initial phase was to begin to develop a shared vision and objectives for the Initiative and identify concrete solutions ready for immediate implementation. This report lays out the values and goals articulated by Initiative partners to date, and the specific recommendations that emerged from extensive discussions facilitated across New York State in the first phase of the project. It also provides a preview of the next phase of work, which will include the development of working groups to pursue longer-term areas for improvement while continuing to identify concrete opportunities for investment along the way.   

New York: Center for Justice Innovation, 2025. 31p.

By Karin D. Martin

The core of the access-to-justice problem is widespread unmet civil legal needs coupled with general disuse of the civil legal system. This Essay posits that monetary sanctions are an important contributing factor to the problem of access to justice. First, monetary sanctions and the unpaid criminal legal debt they produce are engines of “legal hybridity” in people’s lives in a way that impedes access to justice by generating unmet legal needs. They conflate the criminal and civil legal systems in many people’s lives, thereby reducing access to recourse in either system. Second, by subverting the principles of proportionality, specificity, and finality, monetary sanctions structurally deprive people of just solutions and condition them to not expect justice from legal institutions

widespread disuse of the civil legal system to help solve civil legal problems lies at the core. Regardless of whether the crisis is conceptualized as people having insufficient legal assistance, legal information, or access to civil courts, a through line is the failure of people to make use of the benefits ostensibly available to them through the civil legal system. Here, “access to justice” is conceived of in terms of widespread unmet legal needs with an accompanying paucity of just solutions. Theories about the source of this deficit of just resolutions for people with civil legal problems include lack of legal knowledge and knowhow, underfunded courts, and too few lawyers.cal and structural aspects of monetary sanctions, explained in detail below, this Essay argues that it is time to include monetary sanctions as a contributing factor to the problem of access to justice.

Monetary sanctions are the fines, fees, surcharges, restitution, or any other financial liability imposed in the criminal legal system. Three factors make it easy to overlook the role of these sanctions in the access-to-justice problem: (1) Monetary sanctions originate in the criminal legal system; (2) Some people can pay them without difficulty; and (3) They are a less severe sanction than incarceration. Nevertheless, the ubiquity of monetary sanctions and the unpaid criminal legal debt they produce are engines of “legal hybridity” in people’s lives in a way that harms access to justice by giving rise to unmet legal needs. Specifically, this legal hybridity amplifies the potential for extraction in both the criminal and civil legal systems and hinders the potential for resolution in each. Further, monetary sanctions are structured in a way that violates key principles of justice, which inhibits the pursuit of just solutions. This Essay thus argues that failing to consider the role of monetary sanctions in the access-to-justice crisis will stymie efforts to solve it.

This Essay proceeds as follows. Part I explores how monetary sanctions conflate the criminal and civil legal systems in many people’s lives, thereby reducing access to recourse in either. The idea of legal hybridity is offered as a way to conceptualize this phenomenon. While both the criminal and civil legal systems ostensibly offer remedies for all manner of problems, legal hybridity highlights how they also both have the capacity to be extractive—of time, of money, of property, and of liberty. Monetary sanctions should be a point of focus because they often tilt the balance toward extraction, rather than toward recourse. Part II discusses how monetary sanctions undermine central tenets of justice: proportionality, finality, and specificity in punishment. By subverting these principles, monetary sanctions structurally deprive people of just solutions and condition them to not expect justice from legal institutions. Although these principles are typically of concern in the criminal legal setting, the aforementioned legal hybridity underscores the need to consider them more broadly, particularly in the domain of monetary sanctions.

Stanford Law Review Online , Vol. 75, June 2023, 15p.

By Ethan Lowens

Many of the most widely discussed and influential criminal legal reform proposals of the last several years, including "defund the police," "no new jails," and plea strikes, are resource attacks. Resource attacks reduce the footprint of the criminal legal system by creating an imbalance between the resources available to it and the resources it needs to continue status quo operations. Forced into a resource crunch, the theory goes, institutions such as the police, prosecutors, and criminal courts will triage and scale back. There is substantial evidence that resource attacks can, and have, meaningfully reduced incarceration, misdemeanor prosecutions, and executions. Yet, despite their effectiveness, popularity, and political influence, resource attacks presently exist without a name or identity in the criminal legal scholarship. This article fills that gap, beginning with a definition and a catalog of resource attack case studies and proposals. The catalog includes a novel case study: in 2020, New York rewrote its discovery law to impose substantial new burdens on prosecutors. Prosecutors were quickly overwhelmed-following the law's implementation, the rate of dismissals of misdemeanor cases in New York City jumped from 32.6% of cases just prior to reform to 55.2% after. Resource attacks can deliver tremendous impact quickly and at low political cost. However, their effects are often temporary as affected institutions adapt to constraints or secure additional funding. Resource attacks can even backfire, forming the foundation for a bigger, more destructive criminal legal system. The article concludes with guidance for architects of prospective resource attacks: they should tailor their plans to a jurisdiction's particular legal and institutional features, prepare to stay engaged well after their intervention's launch, and promote statutory changes that make the temporary effects of a resource attack permanent.

 N.Y.U. Review of Law & Social Change Volume 47, Issue 4, 2025, pp. 479-538 pages

By Marjorie Mayo, Gerald Koessl, Matthew Scott and Imogen Slater.

This book explores the dilemmas being faced by professionals and volunteers who are aiming to provide access to justice for all and to promote social justice agendas in increasingly challenging contexts. Public service modernisation has been accompanied by increasing marketisation and massive public expenditure cuts, with escalating effects in terms of the growth of social inequalities. As the following chapters illustrate, Law Centres have provided a lens through which to examine the implications of these wider policies, as increasing marketisation has been impacting upon staff and volunteers working to promote social justice in disadvantaged communities.

Policy Press (2014) 174p.

Edited By Jessica Jacobson And Penny Cooper.

Concepts, Realities and Aspirations. Foreword by the Rt Hon Sir Ernest Ryder : “The authors’ central thesis is that people should be able to participate effectively in the court and tribunal proceedings that directly concern them….The study shows that practitioners do, by and large, make sincere efforts to help lay users participate in proceedings; yet many barriers to participation remain which can leave users marginalised in hearings. It is the responsibility of all those who work in courts and tribunals to understand these barriers and take steps to help users overcome them – this study provides insight and practical suggestions. “

Bristol University Press (2020) 198p.