About This Blog
This blog is about access to justice, and is designed for those in who in the field to obtain and discuss new ideas. We define access to justice broadly to include innovations in courts, the bar, legal aid and community that make it easier for people to obtain access to justice institutions, and to just results within those institutions. The blog may also contain material from unrelated fields that is thought relevant to our work in this area.
Opinions are those of the authors, and not necessarily of those of the organizations with which they may be associated.
About Ricard Zorza
Richard Zorza is an attorney and independent consultant who has worked for the past fifteen years on issues of access to justice. He is the coordinator of the national Self Represented Litigation Network, see www.selfhelpsupport.org, and has acted as a consultant to the Harvard Law School Bellow-Sacks Project on the Future of Access to Civil Justice, www.bellowsacks.org, and works in support of the national LawHelp network of access to justice websites, www.lawhelp.org.
His book, The Self-Help Friendly Court: Designed from the Ground Up to Work for People Without Lawyers, was published by the National Center for State Courts in 2002. His article The Disconnect Between the Requirements of Judicial Neutrality and Those of the Appearance of Neutrality when Parties Appear Pro Se: Causes, Solutions, Recommendations, and Implications, 17 Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics, 423 (2004) is widely used to define the structure of thought on the topic.
He coordinated the National Judicial Conference on Self-Represented Litigation held at Harvard Law School in November of 2007, the launching conference of the Court Leadership Package on Self Represented Litigation, in the fall of 2008, and a national confernce on Public Libraries and Access to Justice in January of 2010. He is the recipient of the 2008 American Judicature Society Kate Sampson Access to Justice Award.
He lives in Washington DC, and is in partnership with his wife Joan.
Additional information and publications are available on his website, www.zorza.net. He blogs at http://www.accesstojustice.net.
Richard – I think that it would be great if we could co-ordinate our work / touch base with one another. I (a law professor) am documenting the stories of SRL’s in Canada (whose experiences of course are going to be the same or very similar to those in the US). See our website at http://www.representing-yourself.com. Would love to chat and share some data/ ideas.