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Access to Justice Project
About the Pace Access to Justice Project
The Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University is deeply committed to working to advance racial and social justice in the United States and around the world. Spurred by a climate of injustice, in 2020 Haub Law established the Pace Access to Justice (Pace A2J) Project to recommit itself to ensuring that students, faculty and staff would use its training, energy, and resources to effect change in the way that law is taught, learned, and applied to promote social justice. Building upon the longstanding work of our clinics and externships, we expanded our reach through innovative curriculum and training, faculty and student activities, and partnerships in the community to address the access to justice gap from multiple angles.
Housed and coordinated within Haub Law’s Public Interest Law Center, Pace A2J serves as a hub for community collaborations, programs, scholarship, policy initiatives, and hands-on innovative academic and non-credit bearing experiential law student and alumni opportunities. Together, Pace A2J is designed to more actively engage students in learning about and contributing to real-world efforts to address the access to justice gap.
A2J Curriculum and Programs
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In this unique small seminar, students will build critical research and writing skills for legal practice, and gain a foundation in the wide-ranging access to justice issues that are increasingly relevant to both public interest and private sector legal practice, by drafting and presenting a compelling scholarly paper on an access to justice issue.
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The Access to Justice Lab is a two-credit course co-taught by Haub Law Professor Elyse Diamond and Andreea Cotoranu, Clinical Professor and Director of the NYC Design Factory in Pace University’s Seidenberg School of Computer Science and Information Systems.
In the Lab, students are taught to apply a human-centered approach to collaboratively design the prototype for an innovative technology product or app to address a real-world legal A2J problem. Using legal technology to address A2J is a rapidly growing field and involves developing wide-ranging tools, including those to better educate the public about legal rights, court processes, or available legal services, self-help tools and tools that do basic legal tasks, and tools to track and manage data.
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Our annul Access to Justice Workshop brings together law students, legal experts, advocates, and impacted community members to examine a specific legal and social justice issue. Along with a panel of experts, attendees participate in an interactive discussion to explore and generate action steps that our law school community might take to better understand and contribute to filling access gaps in that area.
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In 2022, the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University opened Westchester County’s first Legal Hand Call-in Center, in partnership with Legal Hand, Inc., an innovative community-based service. The virtual Legal Hand Call-In Center is operated by the Law School, with the support of Haub Law students and community volunteers. It provides free legal information and referrals to community members who need assistance in the areas of housing, immigration, family issues, public benefits, domestic violence, elderly assistance, estate issues and other challenging life issues.
More about our commitment to Social Justice
Meet Our Alumni
Pamela Guerrero '23: A Passion for Social Justice
A first-generation US Citizen, Pamela Guerrero entered law school with a passion for social justice and immigration law. Throughout law school, she followed that passion by participating in Haub Law’s Access to Justice Seminar, the Access to Justice Lab and the Immigration Justice Clinic. As a 3L, Pamela was awarded a prestigious Immigrant Justice Corps Fellowship post-graduation. Today, she is following her dreams as she works with the Refugee & Immigrant Program of The Advocates for Human Rights.