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27 CUNY L. Rev. 1 (2024)

handle is hein.journals/nyclr27 and id is 1 raw text is: ACCESS TO INJUSTICE: HOW LEGAL REFORMS REINFORCE MARGINALIZATION Roni Amitt ABSTRACT Marginalized individuals are largely excluded from making rights claims in the courts because their stories of rights violations fall outside of prescribed legal categories. Framing this exclusion as a lack of knowledge and access, proponents of the access to justice movement have sought to improve outcomes for unrepresented and marginalized litigants through measures that help them understand and navigate the system. The access to justice movement seeks to make the justice system more accessible to these litigants by focusing on procedural fairness. This Article draws on empirical data and observations from Tulsa's eviction court to consider the limits of access to justice measures fo- cused on process, including representation. It calls for an expanded un- derstanding of access to justice that incorporates the rights claims of marginalized individuals. Asking how lawyers representing marginal- ized clients can best advocate for their clients' rights and achieve social change, it draws on the law and social change literature around legal mobilization. The elevation of access to justice measures focused on process masks the underlying inequities embedded in the law. By failing to en- gage with societal patterns of marginalization, process-based access to justice reforms not only replicate social power imbalances and margin- alization, but they also legitimize them through the aggrandizement of procedural fairness. Access to justice reforms continue to operate within the dominant normative universe that privileges particular legal catego- ries and bounds the narrative scope. This approach both inhibits social change and perpetuates the continued exclusion of the narratives of T Assistant Professor of Law, University of Massachusetts School of Law. For helpful feedback and comments on conceptual ideas and previous drafts, I would like to thank Anne Bloom, Faisal Chaudhry, Katie Dilks, Derick Fay, Kai Mai, Patrick Rivers, and the organiz- ers and participants of the 2022 New Directions in Law & Society Conference at the UMass Amherst. I also wish to thank the students at the Terry West Civil Legal Clinic at the Uni- versity of Tulsa for their commitment to documenting the unseen experiences of tenants at Tulsa's eviction court. I

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