Many people in Philadelphia navigate civil courts without legal representation, confronting significant challenges in housing, debt collection, and family matters. These “lawyerless courts,” which make up the majority of state civil courts, are often people’s primary experience with the justice system, yet they are marked by a lack of legal guidance and limited transparency.
At Penn Carey Law, Practice Professor Colleen Shanahan collaborates closely with local communities to tackle these issues through innovative research and impactful advocacy. Her work highlights the disconnect between the serious consequences people face and the brief, often inaccessible nature of their court experiences.
In this video, Professor Shanahan introduces Justice Lab, a dynamic clinic where students apply legal skills to real-world challenges by representing clients, shaping policy, and designing access-to-justice initiatives. Each semester brings new, multidimensional projects—some rooted in Philadelphia, others expanding statewide or even nationally. From affordable housing to forensic science reform, Justice Lab exemplifies Penn Carey Law’s commitment to thoughtful, evolving legal advocacy and real-world impact.
Transcript
Colleen Shanahan:
I research a particular kind of state and local court that I call lawyerless courts. So these are the 75% of civil courts in our states where people go to court without a lawyer. These are things like housing courts, debt collection courts, family courts, and, in fact, they’re the most common experience of the civil justice system in America.
The hardest thing about studying state and local courts is the sort of simultaneous challenge of getting information, getting data, especially for empirical scholarship. These are courts that often don’t keep their own records with any level of detail or accessibility. So, the research access is a big challenge. And then the sort of corresponding challenge is how serious the consequences are in people’s lives, but also how briefly they’re engaging with the court system.
So when we think about studying these courts and understanding the lived experience of people in them, that’s actually a really hard thing to get at, because the number of minutes that someone’s in a lawyerless court is often zero. But, even if they do end up getting to the courtroom, it’s 20 minutes out of their life.
So the clinic will be starting at Penn. It’s called Justice Lab, and it’s a clinic that helps students learn. And by doing so, how to change the legal system. And we look at, in theory, all parts of the legal system.
But my particular interest in state and local government and courts intersects with that work. So the challenges that we work on in the civil and criminal justice systems almost always involve layers of local, state, and federal law, and the places where students advocate for change really vary all throughout the system. Sometimes it’s in courts, sometimes it’s in state legislatures, sometimes it’s with federal agencies.
But that interdisciplinary and multidimensional approach to advocacy is something that is sort of part of creating change at the state and local level. So one of the fun things about this lab is a clinic is that every semester is different. We take on three new projects every semester. And sometimes the work is related. Sometimes it’s a sequence of steps in pursuit of a similar goal, but sometimes it’s brand new.
Our work will definitely focus on Philadelphia. That’s where we are at the community. That holds us up. And it also probably will, in different semesters, move to statewide work. It’s hard to solve the local problems of Philadelphia without moving to statewide advocacy at some point. We also have had successes in the past where we have a local success, and then other states ask us to come in and try to replicate it.
And so that’s something that I hope will happen here at Penn.
Original source can be found here.