Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Access To Justice: Ohio Justice Bus

Access To Justice: Ohio Justice Bus

Two people speaking about legal matters.

Canva Images

For many Americans, any sort of legal entanglement can send their lives into a tailspin. A landlord illegally withholding a security deposit can initiate a period of economic insecurity. An old criminal charge that qualifies for expungement may prevent someone from earning that next job. A marriage gone south can be made all the more difficult when divorce proceedings start to get squirrely. In each of these scenarios, the lives of Americans would be made vastly better if the legal profession stepped up to fulfill its obligation to everyday individuals, rather than just high-paying clients. This is a solvable problem. The solution is on display in Ohio.

The idea of “mobile justice” animated a group of Ohioans to launch the Ohio Justice Bus in 2019. They realized that too many of their community members lacked reliable access to attorneys to assist with pressing issues—from landlord/tenant disputes to family law matters. Like so many states across the country, Ohio is home to legal deserts in which the demand for legal services vastly outnumbers the supply of quality, affordable legal assistance. Rather than simply hope that more attorneys opted to settle down in smaller communities, the folks behind the Ohio Justice Bus had a much simpler idea—bring legal expertise to the people.


Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

A simple model has allowed the organization to untangle thousands of Ohioans from resource- and time-intensive legal matters. Led by a small but mighty team, the Ohio Justice Bus coordinates with community organizations across the state to host clinics on specific, common legal issues. The organization’s staff attorney, combined with local attorneys, will then spend the day walking community members through their legal matters. To amplify the impact of its visits, the mobile legal aid office is equipped with WiFi so attorneys can remotely engage in Zoom meetings with rural residents in need of some advice. More than 600 Ohioans benefited from the Ohio Justice Bus’ services in 2023. In 2024, the organization aided another 700 residents. In each of those years, it hosted more than 105 clinics and recorded upwards of 20,000 miles.

Mobile justice in Ohio is not a happy accident. Instead, it is the product of a deliberate choice by legal community members who refuse to accept a world in which access to justice is a function of access to deep pockets. From the attorneys at Honda, who routinely sign up for volunteer slots, to the folks at a local Mercedes Benz dealership, who helped the Ohio Justice Bus procure their van, the success of the organization is a product of a collection of builders and doers.

Ohio is not the only state where mobile justice is catching on. Similar efforts exist in Kentucky, Minnesota, New York, Tennessee, and Utah. But there’s still so much room for improvement.

Attorneys in most states are encouraged (i.e. not required)to complete 20-30 hours of volunteer service per year. That’s shockingly low, especially given that many such attorneys make more money than they know what to do with. Some junior associates at “big law” firms have starting salaries north of $250,000. If state bar associations are going to restrict the total number of attorneys, then they owe it to the public to make sure those who do pass the bar exam take the duty of the profession to serve their community seriously—to help Americans benefit from the legal system rather than feel captive to it.

The success of the Ohio Justice Bus and similar projects goes to show that there’s still a can-do spirit across the country. Acceptance of the status quo—marked by unequal access to opportunity and pay-to-play systems—is a choice. Thankfully, some Americans are opting to choose a different, more prosperous future. Hopefully, their example will catch on.

Kevin Frazier is an Adjunct Professor at Delaware Law and an Emerging Technology Scholar at St. Thomas University College of Law.

Read More

After Decades of Taking Others’ Freedom, Prosecutors Cry Foul Over Fixing Their Mistakes

A small Lady Justice statue.

Getty Images, MarianVejcik

After Decades of Taking Others’ Freedom, Prosecutors Cry Foul Over Fixing Their Mistakes

Louisiana District Attorneys Association (LDAA), a special interest lobbying group, stands in the way of justice in Louisiana. On May 21, the LDAA successfully blocked a legislative pathway for hundreds of people to receive fair constitutional trials. Louisiana is the only state in the United States of America where people are serving sentences in prison, some for life, where a jury did not agree on whether they were guilty.

For nearly 1,000 people in Louisiana prisons, a jury could have found them guilty but instead returned a verdict that would be called a “hung jury” if the case had been tried in Alabama, Texas, New York, California, Mississippi, and other states.

Keep ReadingShow less
Impact of Trump’s Executive Actions: Attacks on Lawyers and the Legal Profession

Someone tipping the scales of justice.

Getty Images, sommart

Impact of Trump’s Executive Actions: Attacks on Lawyers and the Legal Profession

Project Overview

This essay is part of a series by Lawyers Defending American Democracy explaining in practical terms what the administration’s executive orders and other executive actions mean for all of us. Each of these actions springs from the pages of Project 2025, the administration's 900-page playbook that serves as the foundation for these measures. The Project 2025 agenda should concern all of us, as it tracks strategies adopted by countries such as Hungary, that have eroded democratic norms and have adopted authoritarian approaches to governing.

Project 2025’s stated intent to move quickly to “dismantle” the federal government will strip the public of important protections against excessive presidential power and provide big corporations with enormous opportunities to profit by preying on America's households.

Keep ReadingShow less
Child Victims of Crime Are Not Heard

Shadow of a boy

Getty Images/mrs

Child Victims of Crime Are Not Heard

Justice is not swift for anyone, and even less so for children. In Mexico, as in many other countries, children who are victims of crime must endure not only the pain of what they have lived through, but also the institutional delays that, instead of protecting them, expose them to new forms of harm. If we truly acted with the urgency that child protection demands, why doesn’t the justice system respond with the same urgency?

Since January, a seven-year-old girl in Mexico, a survivor of sexual violence at her school, has been waiting for a federal judge to resolve an amparo, a constitutional appeal she filed requesting the right to participate in the criminal case against her aggressor in a protected and adapted manner. According to the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (Mexico’s highest court), amparos must be used as urgent remedies when fundamental rights are at imminent risk. And yet, four months have passed with no resolution.

Keep ReadingShow less
Understanding The Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA)

Judge gavel and book on the laptop

Getty Images/Stock

Understanding The Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA)

Background

In November 2024, Elon Musk posted on social media, “There should be no need for [Freedom of Information Act] requests. All government data should be default public for maximum transparency.” His statement reignited discussions on the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, a federal law enacted in 1966 that requires federal executive branch agencies to disclose information in specific ways. Since its original passage in 1966, FOIA has been updated three times to tighten agency compliance, account for digital records, and allow citizens to request records online. Under FOIA, government agencies must disclose information by:

FOIA includes nine exemptions to protect against harms that might result from divulging certain records; these exemptions include cases like invasion of personal privacy, information related to national security, and information that would interfere with law enforcement proceedings.

Keep ReadingShow less