Notable Recent Publications, March 2026
Articles
Braudy, E., Honan, T., & Begum, T. (2025). Housing Justice Pipeline: Harnessing Housing Clinics to Transform the Right to Counsel Movement. Seattle Journal for Social Justice, 24(1), 17.
https://digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2309&context=sjsj
[shortened] Despite the expansion of the Right to Counsel laws and funding, legal service providers face challenges in recruiting, hiring, and retaining eviction defense attorneys to meet community needs. Simply put, there are not enough experienced housing attorneys to meet the growing demand. The Housing Justice Pipeline directly addresses the attorney supply crisis, making full and meaningful implementation of the Right to Counsel for tenants achievable, by establishing and cultivating these clinical partnerships. While the Housing Justice Pipeline is broad in scope, this article focuses on the following two pillars of the Housing Justice Pipeline: (1) law school clinical offerings in housing justice; and (2) the legal service providers representing tenants and their families in eviction proceedings. The Pipeline Project conducted a nationwide survey of legal educators and administrators and developed the Housing Justice Pipeline (HJP) National Report to better understand the current landscape of housing law education and to identify opportunities for growth with the purpose of strengthening and sustaining the pipeline. The HJP National Report showed that 81 law schools across 37 states and Washington D.C., have housing justice clinics, many created in rapid response to the nation-wide expansion of Right to Counsel laws in eviction proceedings, through varied clinical models, and established crucial partnerships with legal service providers. This article highlights these key findings and argues that a robust Housing Justice Pipeline is necessary to achieve the purpose of the Right to Counsel movement.
Braun, M., Wright, R. F., & Turner, J. I. (2026). Defense Use of Digital Discovery in Criminal Cases: A Quantitative Analysis. Justice Quarterly, 43(1), 53-77.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07418825.2025.2460587
Recent criminal court reforms have required prosecutors to provide defense attorneys with broader and earlier discovery of evidence. For these discovery reforms to fulfill their aims of improved fairness and efficiency, defense attorneys must take advantage of the evidence disclosed by the prosecution. Prior studies suggest, however, that a range of fac-tors, including low pay and high caseloads, impede effective defense representation in general. If similar factors hinder defense attorneys from reviewing discovery, discovery reforms would fail to meet their goals, and defendants would receive sub-standard representation.
The recent adoption of digital evidence platforms by local jurisdictions allows us to study whether defense attorneys consistently fulfill their duty to review discovery. Analyzing data from digital evidence platforms used in felony cases in four Texas counties between 2018 and 2020, we examine whether and when defense attorneys fail to access evidence disclosed by the prosecution. We find that a substantial number of defense attorneys never access the discovery. The access rate varies by county, offense seriousness, attorney category, attorney experience, and file type. Drawing on review of prior scholarship and Bayesian analysis of the data, we discuss plausible interpretations of these variations.
Hylton, K. N., & Kim, S. (2026). The Economics of Appeals. The Journal of Law and Economics, 69(1), 53-79.
This paper examines the incentive to appeal. While existing literature focuses on appeals as a mechanism for correcting errors or controlling judicial incentives, we explore individual litigants’ incentives in civil and criminal cases by modeling the opportunity cost of the trial court judgment for litigants when deciding whether to appeal. In civil trials, this causes a reluctance to appeal for plaintiffs and a bias in favor of appealing for defendants. The same effect induces a bias toward appeal for defendants convicted in criminal trials. We also model the factors that determine appeals and posttrial settlements. Our model illustrates the importance of litigants’ beliefs about their prospects on appeal in driving appeals: If parties are sufficiently pessimistic, appellate courts will play little role in correcting errors or controlling judicial incentives. We also examine the empirical literature on appeals and compare the model’s implications to the claims therein.
Komarla, A. (2026). Can LLMs Synthesize Court-Ready Statistical Evidence? Evaluating AI-Assisted Sentencing Bias Analysis for California Racial Justice Act Claims.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.04804
Resentencing in California remains a complex legal challenge despite legislative reforms like the Racial Justice Act (2020), which allows defendants to challenge convictions based on statistical evidence of racial disparities in sentencing and charging. Policy implementation lags behind legislative intent, creating a 'second-chance gap' where hundreds of resentencing opportunities remain unidentified. We present Redo.io, an open-source platform that processes 95,000 prison records acquired under the California Public Records Act (CPRA) and generates court-ready statistical evidence of racial bias in sentencing for prima facie and discovery motions. We explore the design of an LLM-powered interpretive layer that synthesizes results from statistical methods like Odds Ratio, Relative Risk, and Chi-Square Tests into cohesive narratives contextualized with confidence intervals, sample sizes, and data limitations. Our evaluations comparing LLM performance to statisticians using the LLM-as-a-Judge framework suggest that AI can serve as a powerful descriptive assistant for real-time evidence generation when ethically incorporated in the analysis pipeline.
Reports, Briefs, and Other Resources
Phillips Black. (2026). Examining Finley “no-merit” letters: An empirical review of attorney abandonment of Philadelphia defendants facing life without parole. Stoneleigh Foundation.
https://stoneleighfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Phillips-Black-Finley-Report_FINAL.pdf
[shortened] Finley “no-merit” letters are a feature of Pennsylvania’s post-conviction review system. Filed pursuant to Commonwealth v. Finley, they are a mechanism under which a lawyer appointed to represent a petitioner in post-conviction proceedings may move to withdraw from the representation by arguing that all their client’s claims lack merit in a publicly filed “no-merit” letter…Despite the frequency of Finley letters in postconviction cases, no empirical data about Finley “no merit” letters has previously been collected. To begin filling this gap, Phillips Black collected 335 Finley “no-merit” letters from across Pennsylvania and analyzed how the procedure functioned in each case. A subset of 100 Finley letters filed in Philadelphia homicide cases involving LWOP sentences was more closely reviewed for insight into ethical issues and the quality of legal analysis.
If you have suggestions, ideas for work that should be included, or trouble accessing any of the articles featured, please email Venita Embry at vembry.embry@gmail.com.
