The summer of 2014 was an important one for Jennifer Noelle and her husband Justin. Recently, they had become a Host Family for Safe Families for Children, voluntarily taking in children for short periods of time from the Near Eastside neighborhood of Indianapolis. While hosting two young African American men in their home that August, Jennifer and her husband watched the news stories coming out of Ferguson, Missouri about an 18-year-old African American man named Michael Brown who was fatally shot by a police officer. This confluence of events was the beginning of an evolution of their faith perspective for both Jennifer and Justin.

I first became involved in access to justice issues when engaging in pro bono during my first year in law school at Georgetown. While at Georgetown, I volunteered a few hours a week for the Washington Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights & Urban Affairs, primarily conducting intake. I also became interested in interdisciplinary legal thinking in my first year in law school, though psychology has interested me for many years. Personal disclaimer: My wife is a professor in IU’s Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, and my father is, and my grandfather was, a psychiatrist. Indeed, but for being a lawyer, I might have been a psychologist!  

People are thinking about how to make the legal system work for actual people, and not just people with law degrees. We've still got a long way to go, but I am hopeful that we can begin to simplify access to our legal system as the years go on. The thought-experiment that we are doing is asking, "What would the legal system be like if it were made to be accessible?" Imagine that.