Innovation for Justice (i4J) is the nation’s first and only cross-discipline, cross-institution, and cross-jurisdiction legal innovation lab, housed at both the University of Utah David Eccles School of Business and the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law. Students who enroll in i4J courses work with diverse, multi-discipline teams of graduate students from both universities, applying design- and systems-thinking methodologies to expose inequalities in the justice system and create new, replicable, and scalable strategies for legal empowerment. The community-engaged program applies participatory action research methods to engage students with lived-experience experts and diverse system actors in the nonprofit, government, and private sectors to advance fair and equitable dispute resolution through systems-level change at both service and policy levels.
The unique curricular blend of entrepreneurship and access to justice offers students learning opportunities that launch real-world solutions. In i4J’s UX4Justice course, students interested in product design have an opportunity to engage in user research to understand an unmet consumer need, design potential new product solutions for that need, prototype and test those solutions, and then develop a roadmap to product distribution. UX4Justice students have engaged with product design challenges related to social justice issues including social security disability applications, child support negotiations and debt collection. “The real-world project work at UX4Justice prepared me for my post-MBA career in a way no other class could. The experience taught me how to be a more empathetic researcher, intentional problem-solver, and strategic designer, which are skills I still lean on to this day,” reports Miranda Garrett, Eccles MBA Class of 2022.
Students interested in service model design can gain experience developing new service models through i4J’s Innovating Legal Services course, which partners with communities on the front lines of the access to justice crisis in co-designing legal service innovations that are relational, upstream, and right-sized. Over the past five years, i4J students have collaborated with over 1,000 voices in the development of community-based justice worker initiatives. This month celebrates the launch of four simultaneous community-based justice worker cohorts in the domestic violence/family law, housing stability, and medical debt practice areas in Utah and Arizona – all projects that began in the i4J classroom. “A new chapter in justice-making is here, and it’s a privilege to be in service of our states’ community-based justice workers in leading the path forward,” said Gabriela Elizondo-Craig, Project Lead at Innovation for Justice and i4J Alumni. “In building a new home for legal knowledge, our work has shown that another way is possible and that our profession’s future lies in the community law school.”
These learning opportunities are part of a growing national movement challenging the legal system to rethink how and by whom legal help is delivered. With a ripple of jurisdictions from coast to coast now exploring disruptive legal service models and legal technologies, i4J students are well-positioned to be disruptive justice changemakers in their future careers.
Learn more about Innovation for Justice at innovation4justice.org.