Our company’s values: The politics of expanding access to justice
CrowdJustice is a company with a social mission. We are a platform that brings together people in search of justice. We increase access to the law in a way that’s powerful and educational. We are a company that celebrates the power of online action, of community, and of the justice system. We provide a service that has helped hundreds of people raise millions of dollars, create legal precedent, and given nearly a hundred thousand people their first interaction with the law.
It should be easy for us to be honest about our company values. At our core is the very liberal value of making the justice system an institution that applies to everyone. That’s a social mission that we wear on our sleeve. It’s fundamental to our mission and even to our business model.
But in a way, being a place where people can come to increase access to justice has made it harder for us to be transparent about values that can sometimes come across as political. Law is often complex and resolving issues through the justice system rarely tracks precisely along political fault lines. And what’s core about being a platform that gives access to the law is that the courts, not the platform, make the call about how the law should be applied and the outcomes that should ensue.
We’re proud to be a place where high objective standards and safeguards ensure that every case involves a real, regulated lawyer (or non-profit), and that funds go to lawyer’s client trust accounts or to non-profits directly. That way we remove ourselves from the position of adjudicator, and reinforce our core mission to give people access to the sometimes remote institution that is the law.
But it is hard to avoid a political posture when democracy in the US seems to be on fire. There is damage being done — to immigrant’s rights, to women’s rights, to the laws that protect our environment, to freedom of speech, to LGBT rights, to voting rights — that we didn’t expect when we came to the US with the same approach to expanding access to the law that has seen us crowdfund some of the most high profile public law cases in the UK judicial system over the last two years. Because in the US, even the notion of expanding access to justice has itself become profoundly (and distressingly) politicized.
In the world we’re living in now, companies — all companies — have an unusual responsibility to be honest about values when so many values are under attack. And in this moment, our values compel us to acknowledge that, yes, we are political, if political means allowing cases on our platform only where they don’t inspire hatred and undermine the rights of people to live peacefully together, or where they don’t support alt-right style attacks on those rights. Our long-standing case policy has enabled us to take controversial cases as long as the intention of those cases is not to cause unnecessary upset or inspire discrimination or hate — and in practice the objective thresholds we’ve set to use the platform have served as a natural selector so that we don’t tend to see more than a couple of those cases per year.
Some of the hundreds of cases we have seen: the Supreme Court challenge in the UK that determined that Parliament had to decide whether Brexit went ahead (a groundbreaking case that established constitutional hierarchy in the UK); one of the first federal challenges to the Immigration Ban in the US (a case of two green card holders, young brothers who were deported — at their own expense — upon arriving in Dulles a day after the Ban); a legal defense fund for a 21-year-old woman who witnessed a police officer kill her unarmed boyfriend before her eyes; a case fighting for voting rights for felons in Florida; and many more.
We’re proud of our values, and what we’ve done so far to enhance the strength and values of our society, through access to the judicial system. We hope you’ll support us and the cases on our platform as we try to come out behind the common value of access to the law at a time when the courts, and legal rights, have never been more important.
Julia Salasky
CEO, CrowdJustice
27 July 2017
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