Apply to be one of our inaugural fellows at the Judicial Innovation Fellowship (JIF)!
Note: Applications for fellows are now open! Read the job posting to learn more about fellow applications, and click here to apply.
JIF is a brand new interdisciplinary program at Georgetown Law that places technologists and designers in state, local, tribal, and territorial courts to improve the public's access to justice. The goal is to develop open, replicable, and scalable solutions that make courts more transparent, equitable, and efficient. It is also an opportunity to seed culture change in courts by helping usher in the adoption of modern technology and user design practices.
Courts provide crucial infrastructure for the justice platform: individuals access the courts in order to resolve some of our most weighty conflicts. But the justice platform is in trouble due to our national access to justice crisis. Each year across the United States, 55 million Americans experience 260 million civil legal problems—including issues with eviction, consumer debt, domestic violence, veterans’ benefits, and health care. Yet ninety-two percent of low-income individuals facing a legal problem receive inadequate or no legal help, a problem increasingly experienced by the middle class and exacerbated by racial and gender disparities. Court processes are often confusing, not user-friendly, and built with lawyers in mind, even though vanishingly fewer Americans can afford an attorney.
Justice technology projects can play a crucial role in improving access to justice, from open data systems that increase transparency, automated notifications for individuals of hearing dates, and public-facing efiling tools. The COVID-19 pandemic, in particular, has shown both the promises and perils of deploying new court technologies such as online hearings. Yet courts face numerous challenges with implementing technologies, including budget and staffing shortfalls, an undeveloped or risk-averse approach to innovation and experimentation, and a lack of external options when shopping for software and vendors.
Our plan is to have our first cohort of fellows in courts around the US and tribal lands by September 2023.
Once placed, we anticipate our fellows will work on projects that improve data collection and interoperability, the usability of electronic filing, and incorporate user-design into public-facing court products. The injection of design and digital expertise across a range of carefully chosen court sites will prompt the emergence of replicable models and best practices, creating a multiplier effect that builds a 21st century justice system.
Applications for fellows are now open! Read the job posting to learn more about fellow applications, and click here to apply.
If you want to receive email updates, we have a mailing list sign up, as well.
To learn more, visit our website at https://judicialinnovation.org/.
You can open an issue on this GitHub repository if you have a specific question about the process, and we'll get to your question!