Re-Regulating Justice: Realizing Housing Stability Through Community Legal Advocacy

• Published in: Journal of Affordable Housing & Community Development Law 2024-01, Vol.32 (3), p.393-426
• Main Authors: Coronado, Antonio M, Crisler, Rachel, Balser, Cayley, Jane, Stacy Rupprecht
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Aggression; Community; COVID-19; Decision making; Design; Domestic violence; Evaluation; Eviction; Housing; Law; Law reform; Laws, regulations and rules; Legal advocacy; Legal assistants; Licensing, certification and accreditation; Low income groups; Low income housing; Management; Pandemics; Pro bono legal services; Regulatory reform; Remedies; Rental housing; Right to counsel; Rogers, James E; Scaling; Stability; Trauma; Unauthorized practice of law; Violence
• ISSN: 1084-2268; 2163-0305

[...]Section IV outlines Innovation for Justice's work so far to develop and launch Housing Stability Legal Advocates, an initiative that grounds the future of housing stability in the transformative power of community legal advocacy. To date, all of our initiatives aim to train and support community-based advocates in providing limited-scope legal services.3 For i4J, this is the poten-tial of UPL reform in the civil legal justice space: community-vested legal knowledge and autonomy or community legal power.4 As Section II will explore in greater detail, reform of the civil legal system has sought to lower that barrier to entry, but to date has focused mostly on market-driven approaches. With few exceptions, these rooms centered traditional legal perspectives and brainstormed solutions without fully understanding the problem from the point of view of someone experienc-ing it.7 i4J works to end this status quo practice of exclusion through the deliberate inclusion of lived experience experts-or people experiencing the problem-in our design work, with the aim of centering historically excluded communities' points of view in decision-making conversations.8 With these added perspectives and an expanded bench of future professionals who are trained by i4J to understand and prioritize the power of lived experience, i4J has now designed and launched three UPL reform initiatives in Arizona and Utah, each of which is in various stages of imple-mentation and scaling.9 B. iéj's Prior Research into Action The first of i4J's community-based legal advocate initiatives took shape in 2019 and launched in 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic; this work sought to develop a pilot for Domestic Violence Legal Advocates (DVLA, formerly "Licensed Legal Advocates") in the domestic violence (DV) context.10 The DVLA Initiative functions by training and certifying trauma-informed non-lawyer lay legal advocates to give limited-scope legal advice in discrete areas of law to DV survivors. Based on intentional community-based research and design work,11 the DVLA Initiative was presented to the Arizona Suprème Court Task Force on Delivery of Legal Services and was favorably recommended to the Arizona Suprème Court.12 In 2020, the Arizona Suprème Court authorized i4J's Domestic Violence Legal Advocates for limited launch by administrative order.13 Two years later, this order was amended to permit the statewide launch of the initiative.14 This first programmatic endeavor shaped i4J