Race, Class, & the Participatory Consequences of Unequal Access to Civil Justice

• In Event: Race-Class Divides in Political Life

Abstract

Civil statutes protect vital economic, social, and political rights. Moreover, because many areas of civil law govern the relationship between citizens and the state, the ability for citizens to navigate the civil legal system is central to enabling them to capitalize on the social and economic benefits and protections they are nominally guaranteed by a broad array of both U.S. federal and state government policies. While the need for access to civil justice is always critical, it has been exacerbated by the recent pandemic, in which many of the core functions of civil law—preventing unfair evictions and foreclosure, securing access to public benefits, representing borrowers in disputes with lenders and debt collectors, safeguarding women from abusive relationships—have become unfortunately salient.

Unlike for criminal cases, however, Americans have no constitutional right to representation in the civil legal realm. So, despite the fact that three-quarters of low-income households experience at least one civil legal problem each year and one-quarter have six or more civil legal problems, estimates indicate that between 50 and 80 percent of people living in poverty have difficulty accessing the civil legal system. This so-called “justice gap” is particularly harmful for low-income women of color, who are historically both more likely to experience civil legal problems and less likely to have assistance navigating them. Lack of access to civil legal representation is a significant but understudied contributor to the growing economic, racial, and political inequality in the United States (Sandefur 2008). Notwithstanding the critical role of the civil legal realm in the lives of race-class subjugated communities, social scientists have little systematic evidence of how the members of these communities experiences navigating the civil legal realm shape their political efficacy and political power.

This paper offers the first systematic examination of the relationship between people’s experiences with civil legal problems and institutions and their subsequent political behavior. Utilizing original survey data from the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post Election Survey, a 20,000-person national sample that allows for racial group analysis, we first offer a rich descriptive picture of the breadth of civil legal problems experienced by members of different racial groups in the United States and their resources and strategies for addressing those problems. We then explore how people’s disparate experiences navigating civil legal problems with and without legal assistance in a variety of forms 1) correspond with their trust in government broadly and in civil legal institutions specifically and 2) influence broader patterns of political participation. Our findings suggest that, while negative experiences with the civil legal process can demobilize members of already marginalized groups, civil legal institutions can also serve as a site for political mobilization. This study sheds light on one of the most critical, but underexplored, interactions that race-class subjugated communities have with the state, illuminating a key dimension of inequality in American political economy.

Authors

• Mallory E. SoRelle, Duke University

• Jamila D. Michener, Cornell University