Episode 75: Navigating Justice Amid Consumer Contract Complexities

Doing business may mean doing risky business when it comes to sharing data. But consumers may not realize or notice the cost of paying for practices like price discrimination with their data. In this week's episode of Proof Over Precedent, NYU Law Professor Oren Bar-Gill discusses how consumer misperceptions and inattention support the status quo of complexity amid consumer contracts. He also shares the surprising role AI could play in supporting consumers, though not without backlash.

How to lose public trust in a few easy steps: Take a trusted branch of government, give it the heady authority to maintain independence apart from public oversight, and limit access to records that would offer accountability. The lack of transparency would crack the foundation of any well-intentioned agency. This week's Proof Over Precedent episode addresses the state of the judiciary that has led to a decline in public trust and a call for stronger transparency requirements.

When law students have difficulty navigating the federal court records platform PACER, it's time to incorporate universal design. That's the suggested solution in this week's Proof Over Precedent episode. It's also a warning for the Case Modernization Effort currently underway: Pro se litigants represent a sizeable population using PACER, but their user experience has been overlooked in favor of representing the majority user experience by lawyers and court administrators. The result, thus far, has been problematic with a court records system that has become unwieldy in scale and unusable by those most in need of understanding it.

The seven-year-old Open Government Data Act has supported accessible, and useable, data from federal agencies, but it did not extend to the judiciary. This week's Proof Over Precedent episode discusses the massive amounts of data in federal, and particularly state, courts that serve as a missed opportunity to provide transparency, notice court trends, and foster collaboration, all in the name of building trust.

It helps to have a lawyer in court, no question. But in immigration court, where the vast majority of individuals are self-representing and not enough immigration lawyers exist to represent them all anyway, is there a point in asylum proceedings where an attorney could be most effective at supporting due process for clients?

No counsel, worse outcomes in immigration proceedings? This week on Proof Over Precedent, Access to Justice Lab Faculty Director and occasional podcast host Jim Greiner interviewed two Vera Institute of Justice researchers, Jacquelyn Pavilon and Neil Agrawal, about their study measuring the effect of a lawyer in detained 240 removal proceedings in Chicago Immigration Court. Did individuals with legal representation see a greater likelihood of relief, temporary relief, or bond hearings and releases than those without lawyers? The discussion follows both research methodology and adherence to due process.

We like to use Proof Over Precedent as a platform to highlight our evidence-based findings, as well as others' studies, from randomized control trials in the field of law. This is not one of those times. In this week's episode, Professor Jim Greiner talks with the A2J Lab researcher and data analyst who spent years working on our Online Courts study about the disappointment, frustration, and lessons learned from a flawed RCT. They still managed to glean a takeaway from comparing remote and in-person hearings for self-represented litigants in family court.

Self-represented litigants primarily measure procedural justice by whether they had a voice, were listened to, and were treated fairly in court. Do these basic marks of overall satisfaction differ between the mode in which the hearing took place though? This week's Proof Over Precedent episode features an interview with justice reform consultant Emily LaGratta and Nathanael Player, former director of the Utah State Court Self-Help Center, about a study looking at litigants' perception of fairness in their respective experiences with either remote or in-person court.

Jury selection should aim for a balanced and thoughtful panel; in capital cases, that balance is further underscored. This week's "Student Voices" post argues that "death-qualifying juries"--the practice of excluding jurors who oppose the death penalty--disrupts that balance. Those constitutional guarantees of impartiality, equality, and reliability? Not so ensured with practice. Reform options, however, are not so simple.

Serving as a juror fulfills one's civic duty to ensure a system of checks and balances in the U.S. In capital cases, however, "death qualification" ensures that prospective jurors opposed to the death penalty will not have the opportunity to perform this civic duty. This week's Proof Over Precedent episode features a "Student Voices" interview with Megan Byrne of the ACLU's Capital Punishment Project to discuss the shortcomings of less diverse juries due to race, gender, and religious differences. It also looks at a capital case in Kansas in which the courts examined the problems associated with death qualification and the death penalty overall.