The Honorable Richard M. Daley recently joined IIT's Community Development department for the Open House of the Wabash YMCA, located at 37th Street and Wabash Avenue. Featured with the Mayor are children of the Bronzeville community, and IIT student Vinod Kannan, who serves as a teaching assistant for the Digital Media Center. Models scheduled for presentation include a computerized receipt system to monitor child support payment and an online arbitration system to facilitate distribution of assets in divorce cases. Faculty and students are collaborating to analyze and redesign current civil court processes to lift procedural, financial, and cultural barriers that prevent effective access to justice.
Court systems are too complex for all but the most sophisticated non-lawyer.
Yet a growing flood of hundreds of thousands of self-represented litigants are trying to handle their own court cases. Civil justice reform has failed to address many of the issues faced by self-represented litigants. Professor Charles Owens is a world-class design scholar and educator. Chicago-Kent brings a strong history in applying technology to improving legal systems. Our students working together bring expertise from two disciplines to bear on these difficult problems.