Liability chains and access to justice

Researchers working across a variety of contexts have documented a common phenomenon: the tendency for one legal liability or entanglement in people's lives to beget another. In this article, I label such phenomena liability chains and provide a framework for analyzing them as an access to justice issue. To do so, I draw on my original research on welfare fraud investigation, which included a review of documentary evidence and interviews with fraud workers in five politically and socioeconomically diverse U.S. states. Building on previous research, these data reveal three primary ways that liability chains contribute to the access to justice crisis. First, liability chains facilitate the origination of new legal problems, often in ways that are biased and systematically unequal. Second, liability chains involve processes that allow authorities to sidestep procedural protections when building criminal cases. Third, and most importantly from the access to justice perspective, liability chains produce outcomes that are unfair, with likelihoods of new legal liabilities contingent on the presence of existing liabilities and entanglements. Moving forward, this framework offers researchers a resource to test and refine in considering the access to justice implications of liability chains in various sociolegal settings.