CBA Record March-April 2026

THE YOUNG LAWYERS SECTION

T he American civil justice system has a problem: Vast numbers of people have legal problems with legal conse quences, but no realistic way to use the legal system meant to resolve them. This isn’t just a shortage of lawyers; it’s a shortage of justice as a practical matter. The oft-cited Legal Services Cor poration’s 2022 Justice Gap report concluded that low-income Americans received “no or not enough” legal help for 92% of substantial civil legal problems reported. In other words, for most poor households facing eviction, debt collection, domestic violence, public benefits denials, or employment instability, “the law” exists largely as a force acting against them, not a tool they can effectively use to enforce or protect their rights. This gap raises a fundamental question of whether a society can plausibly claim to recognize “rights” while maintaining a dispute-resolution system that many people cannot meaningfully use when those rights are threatened. Access to justice must include the practical ability to invoke public institutions to assert, defend, and vindicate one’s own rights. Otherwise, “rights” become at best aspirations and at worst decorative language attached to a system that functions mainly for those who can afford admission. Rights and Remedies: A Forgotten Tradition The bridge between rights and remedies is as old as common law. In the words of Blackstone, “[w]herever the common law gives a right or prohibits an injury, it also gives a remedy by action,” often paraphrased as, “Where there is a right, there is a remedy.” Even earlier, the Anglo-American legal tradition framed access to justice as something owed in process. For example, the Magna Carta’s famous promise, “To no one will we sell, to no one will we refuse or delay, right or justice,” is a commitment that the machinery of justice cannot be reserved for insiders. Today, the international community has written this idea into the modern human rights canon. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) treats access to justice as a core human rights safeguard. Article 8 recognizes a right to an “effective remedy” before competent national tribunals when fundamental rights are violated, and Article 10 recognizes a right to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal when one’s rights and obligations are determined. Unfortunately, the U.S. has not honored its tribunal tradition. Access to Justice as a Natural Right By Andrew Sharp

The World Justice Project (WJP) Rule of Law Index evaluates rule-of-law performance across countries using household and expert surveys. In WJP’s analysis of the U.S., it ranked 112th of the 143 countries surveyed in the category “people can access and afford civil justice” in 2025. And although the U.S. may place better in broader “civil justice” factor rankings, the access/afford ability subfactor is the one that matters: A justice system can look respectable on paper while still being practically unreachable for ordinary people. Why Access to Justice Fits Inside Natural Rights Natural rights theory is often associated with “negative” liberties: freedom from interference, coercion, or violence. But natural rights, especially in the social contract tradition, also explain why people submit to government at all: to replace private force with public adjudication. The point is not just that one has a right to property, bodily integrity, family stability, or contract; it is that one does not have to enforce those rights on their own. A society’s commitment to resolve disputes through law, rather than self-help, necessarily implies a corresponding right of access to the legal mechanisms that society treats as authoritative. If the state insists that disputes must be resolved “in court,” then “in court” must be meaningfully reachable. Otherwise, the social promise becomes lopsided: informal enforcement is prohibited while formal enforcement is unavailable because it is prohibi tively expensive. Who Can Bridge the Justice Gap? If access to justice is a fundamental natural right, an uncomfort able question is: Who bears the duty to make that right attain able? The answer cannot rest primarily on private charity or individual heroism. Pro bono matters. Legal aid matters. But despite decades of initiatives and innovations, the unmet need continues to grow. According to the ABA Profile of the Legal Profession (2023), on average, there are 2.8 legal aid attorneys per 10,000 people in poverty in the U.S. As a simple matter of

24 March/April 2026