Justice &amp; the Capability to Function in Society

Pleasence, Pascoe; Balmer, Nigel J.

doi:10.1162/daed_a_00547

Cited by 20 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…This approach centers everyday people's experiences of their problems, rather than the technical legal components of these problems. It requires understanding that just as lawyer unavailability is not the primary cause of the access to justice crisis (Sandefur ), increasing the provision of lawyer services is unlikely to be its most effective solution (see Sandefur ; ; Hagan ; Pleasance and Balmer ). Bringing the cultural capital and legal consciousness literatures into conversation with the access to justice work has the potential to provide new understandings of how social experience influences the ways people think about problems they face, which in turn may open new avenues for civil justice remedies.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Legal Consciousness and Cultural Capital

Young¹,

Billings²

2020

Law Soc Rev

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In this article, we use a Bourdieusian framework to theorize the relationship between cultural capital and legal consciousness, and in turn to consider how variation in legal consciousness contributes to the creation and maintenance of legal hegemony. We investigate how cultural capital shapes the ways people navigate situations that force them to mediate between state-conferred rights, on one hand, and requests from state authority, on the other. Specifically, we analyze open-ended responses to a series of vignettes about constitutional rights in the criminal procedure context. We find that high cultural capital gives rise to a greater sense of self-efficacy in police-citizen interactions. This finding parallels the literature on the influence of cultural capital in the education context and may point to a more general pattern of selfadvocacy within the juridical field. People with high cultural capital also evince a more salient sense of entitlement, understanding their own needs and desires as paramount. The social processes we identify may make people with limited cultural capital more vulnerable to investigative authority, and thus more susceptible to arrest and prosecution. Even if knowledge of a right and the opportunity to assert that right are equally distributed, meaningful access to that right remains inequitable.When courts hand down rulings about police-citizen encounters, they often assume that rights assertion is a straightforward matter: If a suspect does not want her home searched without a warrant, she can refuse. If a suspect would rather not tell police where he went last night, he need not speak to them. Courts tend to hold, either implicitly (e.g., United States v. Drayton [2002]) or explicitly (e.g., Salinas v. Texas [2013]) that the rights assertion playing field is level-that is, that the US Constitution affords everyone a meaningful chance to assert his or her rights.But as an empirical matter, we know little about this playing field. Do all innocent people feel equally enabled to assert their rights? What situational factors shape how people think about constitutional rights? Occasionally the Supreme Court has lamented this dearth of research. During oral argument in Brendlin v. California (2007), for example, Justice Stephen BreyerThe authors thank Rebecca Sandefur and two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful feedback, David Sklansky and Robert Weisberg for discussions about the legal implications of this project, Emma Aulenback for her research assistance, and several instructors who generously allowed us to distribute surveys in their courses.Please direct all correspondence to Kathryne M. Young

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Legal Consciousness and Cultural Capital

Young¹,

Billings²

2020

Law Soc Rev

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“…Although terminology may differ between the two fields, both seek to address the complex range of social, structural, and institutional drivers of health and well‐being, and to use various tools (e.g., policy, law) to reduce inequities in social and health outcomes. Enabling access to justice is about more than just resolving legal problems; it is about reducing social inequities that produce health inequities, breaking vicious cycles that “create and compound poverty, undermine socioeconomic development, and contribute to broader social inequality.” 14 (p145)…”

Section: From a Social Model Of Health To A Sociolegal Model Of Healthmentioning

confidence: 99%

Advancing Action on Health Equity Through a Sociolegal Model of Health

Schram

Boyd-Caine²,

Forell³

et al. 2021

Milbank Quarterly

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Health actors can use the law more strategically in the pursuit of health and equity by addressing governance challenges (e.g., fragmented and overlapping mandates between health and nonhealth institutions), employing a broader rights‐based discourse in the public health policy process, and collaborating with the access to justice movement. Health justice partnerships provide a road map for implementing a sociolegal model of health to reduce health inequities by strengthening legal capacities for health among the health workforce and patients. This in turn will enable them to resolve health issues with legal solutions, to dismantle service silos, and to drive systemic policy and law reform. Context In the field of public health, the law and legal systems remain a poorly understood and substantially underutilized tool to address unfair or unjust societal conditions underpinning health inequities. The aim of our article is to demonstrate the value of expanding from a social model of health to a sociolegal model of health and empowering health actors to use the law more strategically in the pursuit of health equity. Methods We propose a modified version of the framework for the social determinants of health (SDoH) equity developed by the 2008 World Health Organization Commission on the Social Determinants of Health by conceptually integrating the functions of the law as identified by the 2019 Lancet–O'Neill Institute Commission on Global Health and Law. Findings Access to justice provides a critical intersection between social models of public health and work in the justice fields. Addressing the inequities produced through the policies and institutions governing society unites the causes of those seeking to enhance access to justice and those seeking to reduce health inequities. Health justice partnerships (HJPs) are an example of a sociolegal model of health in action. Through the resolution of health issues with legal solutions at the individual level, the dismantling of service silos at the institutional level, and policy and law reform at the systemic level, HJPs demonstrate how the law can be used as a tool to reduce social and health inequities. Conclusions Greater attention to law as a tool for health creates space for increased collaboration among legal and health scholars, practitioners, and advocates, particularly those working in the areas of the social determinants of health and access to justice, and a promising avenue for reducing health inequities.

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“…A second factor relates to the opportunity to support individuals' legal capability, which refers to personal attributes such as knowledge, skills, self-efficacy and other resources that are necessary to recognize, respond to and resolve legal problems (McDonald and Wei, 2016, p. 2;Pleasence and Balmer, 2019). Screening for unmet legal needs and legal help delivered within health settings may strengthen clients' recognition of problems as matters amenable to legal intervention.…”

Section: The Individual Patient/clientmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conceptualizing interprofessional working – when a lawyer joins the healthcare mix

Ries

2021

Journal of Interprofessional Care

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Research, policy and practice in the field of interprofessional collaboration have focused on how medical, nursing, allied health and social care practitioners work together to positively impact patient care. This paper extends conceptual thinking about interprofessional practice by focusing on lawyers as part of the interprofessional mix. This attention is prompted by medical-legal partnerships (MLPs), a service model by which lawyers join health care settings to assist patients with unmet, and often health-harming, legal needs. MLPs are present in around 450 hospitals and other health care sites across the United States and the model has spread to other countries, including Australia, the United Kingdom and Canada. However, enthusiasm for the MLP model is not yet matched by good evidence on how, when and for whom the model works. Interprofessional scholars contend that imprecise terminology and poor conceptualization of interprofessional arrangements hinder high-quality research and evaluation. In response to their critiques, this paper formulates a stepwise conceptual framework to guide the design, implementation and study of interprofessional arrangements that connect health, social care and legal practitioners. This framework draws on findings from national surveys of MLP initiatives in several countries and adapts several key conceptual frameworks that have been developed from systematic reviews of interprofessional working in primary health care. These conceptual frameworks are valuable because they promote clarity about different modes of interprofessional working and characterize the factors at macro (policy, funding), meso (organizational) and micro (practitioner, patient) levels that help or hinder professionals from different disciplines in working together. The paper considers factors at these three levels that require particular attention when lawyers join health care settings and proposes questions for future research in this emerging area.

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Justice & the Capability to Function in Society

Cited by 20 publications

References 4 publications

Legal Consciousness and Cultural Capital

Legal Consciousness and Cultural Capital

Advancing Action on Health Equity Through a Sociolegal Model of Health

Conceptualizing interprofessional working – when a lawyer joins the healthcare mix

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