Purpose
Innovation for Justice designs, builds, and tests disruptive solutions to the justice crisis.
To serve as a catalyst for justice sector transformation that prioritizes increasing access to justice for all.
i4J’s Mission:
i4J’s Vision:
To build a future where the legal needs and goals of all peoples are met, where justice is realized by a diverse ecosystem of actors, and where legal power is accessible, usable, and shapeable by everyone.
i4J’s Values:
Crossing boundaries
Housed at both the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law and the University of Utah David Eccles School of Business, Innovation for Justice (i4J) is the nation’s first and only cross-discipline, cross-institution, cross-jurisdiction legal innovation lab. Our research and legal empowerment efforts with and in service of communities across the U.S. positions i4J as an incubator and driver of actionable social change across multiple states.
Reaching across silos
As an interdisciplinary community of students, faculty, staff, alumni, partners, and collaborators committed to access to justice, we apply design and systems thinking methodologies to expose inequalities in the justice system and create new, replicable, and scalable strategies for legal empowerment. Our projects cut across traditional human service, legal, and technological sectors to engage system actors from diverse areas of work and life in disrupting the justice crisis.
Developing future changemakers
Our graduate students are prepared to learn and work with and within the community, lead with empathy, check their assumptions, creatively problem-solve, test new ideas, embrace and learn from failure, iterate and co-create solutions, and engage in data-driven decision-making. Pedagogically, this includes a focus on methods of design thinking and systems thinking, confronting bias, and community-centered collaboration in the future of justice work.
Challenging the status quo
We believe legal knowledge is not the exclusive province of attorneys. We create opportunities for legal advice and assistance to be delivered by trusted community-based advocates with specialized legal training. In reimagining the site and leaders of justice-making, i4J’s work across Impact Areas seeks to democratize legal power by building the bench of individuals who can know, use, and shape the law.
Advancing a trauma-informed, human-centered justice system
We believe that well-designed, accessible, usable, and useful interventions can mitigate existing access to justice barriers and create a more equitable and simplified justice system. Implementing trauma-informed and trauma-responsive practices among staff, student, and community interactions in designing and building these interventions mitigates the risk of retraumatization when interacting with the justice system. This includes learning about trauma, the associated impacts, and paths to recovery.
Working with and within the community
Our participatory action research engages lived experience experts in the community as well as diverse system actors in the nonprofit, government, and private sectors to advance fair and equitable civil justice problem-solving. Recognizing the inherent worth, dignity, and value in community regardless of circumstance, our approach situates systemically disinvested community members as co-researchers who are involved in every step of the research process. In practice and organizational policy, this translates to a commitment to the compensation of and deep respect for the shared time and expertise of co-researchers, co-creators, collaborators, and project partners in our work.
i4J’s three keys to unlocking change.
i4J focuses on three disruptive strategies - Service, System, and Structure - and applies them to the most urgent civil legal issues impacting low-income Americans.
Learn more about each impact area and i4J’s theory of change at Impact Areas.
i4J’s Service Impact Areas focuses on creating new legal service models so more people can know the law.
Visit i4J’s Service Impact Area.
i4J’s System Impact Areas focuses on improving justice sector technologies so more people can use the law.
Visit i4J’s System Impact Area.
i4J’s Structure Impact Areas focuses on building tools for policy advocacy so more people can change the law.
Visit i4J’s Structure Impact Area.
To learn more about how we apply the i4J Approach to do our work, visit Process.
i4J amplifies the reach of community-engaged learning.
Since its founding in 2018, i4J has continuously expanded its impact.
2 Universities
i4J is housed in both the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law and the University of Utah David Eccles School of Business. Expanding to two universities is an incredible opportunity to amplify i4J’s work designing, building, and testing disruptive solutions to the justice gap.
340+ Graduate Students
i4J has trained hundreds of students since the lab was founded in 2018. Our graduates are prepared to lead with empathy, check their assumptions, creatively problem-solve, test new ideas, embrace and learn from failure, iterate and co-create solutions, and engage in data-driven decision-making.
1,575+ Co-Creators
i4J’s action-based research engages lived experience experts and diverse stakeholders in the nonprofit, government, and private sectors to reimagine how innovation and technology can deliver a simplified human-centered justice system, and advance fair and equitable change at both service and policy levels.
To learn more about educational opportunities with i4J, visit Graduate Student Courses and Community Legal Education.