Attorney General Merrick B. Garland Delivers Remarks at the Convening of the Legal Aid Interagency Roundtable

Remarks as Delivered

Thank you, Rachel. I am so grateful for your leadership.

And I am grateful to all the extraordinary public servants of the Department’s Office for Access to Justice for everything that they’ve done as part of LAIR and of really building an office basically from nothing into an enormous institution of incredible vigor and effectiveness in providing access to justice.

For the nearly four years that I have had the honor of serving as Attorney General, I start every single morning by walking through a rotunda, which is right outside my office, in which these words are inscribed: “The United States wins its point whenever justice is done its citizens in [the] courts.”

This message reflects that the Department is responsible not only for enforcing the law, and not only for defending the federal government and its interests, but also for upholding the Rule of Law.

I speak often about the importance of building and maintaining public trust for what we do — and in the Rule of Law itself.

Public faith in the rule of law depends in no small part on faith that our system will ensure equal justice under law.

And fulfilling the promise of equal justice demands that we work to ensure equal access to justice. For without equal access to justice, the promise of equal justice just rings hollow.

The White House Legal Aid Interagency Roundtable (LAIR) seeks to fulfill that promise.

Together, we — the Roundtable’s 28 federal agencies — are charged with “increase[ing] the availability of meaningful access to justice for individuals and families, regardless of wealth or status.”

Since its formation in 2012, the Roundtable has brought its resources and expertise to bear on a range of essential topics related to that critical mission.

I’ll give just a few highlights of what we have done over the last few years:

In 2021, the Roundtable’s work examined the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on access to justice in both the civil and criminal justice systems.

In 2022, we focused on reducing justice gaps by simplifying federal government forms, processes, and language, and emphasizing the importance of getting feedback from the communities we serve.

This work was based on a simple idea: you should not need legal training to access government programs — nor to understand what the government is asking of you.

Last year, we focused on applying those simplification tools to expand access to justice within federal administrative proceedings.

And this year, as Ed and the Second Gentleman said, we turned our focus to a cross-cutting topic that underlies and enables many of these important efforts: the role of data and research in expanding access to justice.

This year’s report explores how agencies can use data and research in developing, implementing, evaluating, and improving federal programs that serve the public.

And it studies the way in which data and research can help us to enable the public to understand and navigate and resolve their justice problems.

This year’s report also highlights the ways that the 28 members of the Roundtable have harnessed data to expand access to justice, including by:

Gathering data to inform efforts to improve access to federal programs;
Evaluating those efforts over time; and
Sharing data to help outside researchers, legal aid organizations, and the general public derive further insight into access to justice issues and solutions.

We will hear more about some of these efforts today, and we are grateful to those in this room who have championed them.

I want to provide just a few updates on what the Justice Department has been doing:

The Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics — which is the federal government’s criminal justice statistics bureau — has collaborated with our Access to Justice Office, to develop the Access to Justice Design and Testing Program.

This new program is aimed at identifying and filling gaps in our data about access to justice for civil legal needs. We are developing and piloting a household-based civil legal needs survey. And we are evaluating additional data collection related to access to justice for civil legal needs.

The Justice Department has also partnered with the U.S. Census Bureau to link individual-level data from a variety of programs with federal and state datasets in order to give us critical insights into how federal programs are working.

We are also committed to ensuring that the public has access to critical data. This includes, for the first time, releasing national-level data regarding deaths of individuals in state and local custody through the Bureau of Justice Assistance. This data is critical to informing the efforts of federal, state, and local law enforcement officials to prevent deaths in custody.

It also includes data ranging from nationwide crime and victimization rates, to maps of treatment courts that enable judicially supervised treatment and alternatives to incarceration.

We will soon hear from several representatives of members’ agencies and offices about some of the key initiatives that their agencies have undertaken to make equal access to justice a reality. I am grateful for the opportunity to learn from you.

But first, again, I want to thank all of you for recognizing the importance of this work and for carrying it through to the work that you do on behalf of the American people every day.

I know I speak for all of us in recognizing that this work could not happen without the dedication, expertise, and passion of the Roundtable’s staff and the Office for Access to Justice under the leadership of Rachel Rossi.

I am particularly grateful to the Roundtable’s Executive Director Allie Yang-Green. Thank you for the work you have done and that you will do to carry this progress forward.

I also want to acknowledge Principal Deputy Associate Attorney General Ben Mizer — that’s a big mouthful but really he’s the Acting Associate Attorney General — and Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Kristen Clarke. Thank you for being here today and for your partnership and support for all of this work.

Serving as a co-chair of the Roundtable has been an enormous honor.

And I am grateful to have been able to serve alongside White House Counsel Ed Siskel, and under Stuart Delery and Dana Remus before him. You and your staff have been excellent partners, and I am grateful. I want to thank the Second Gentleman for your commitment to this. That kind of commitment is what shows everyone in the government that you really care about this.

Ensuring equal access to justice is an ambitious task that requires a true government-wide effort. But it could not be more important. Thank you all.