1ST EDITION · MARCH 2026 · Published by The Blackstone Project
Access to Justice Index
A number per county for whether someone without a lawyer can get through the justice system in it — held to the same method every year.
Cite as
The Blackstone Project at North Carolina Law, Access to Justice Index (1st ed. 2026)
Formats
web · pdf · csv
all free, all citable
all free, all citable
The Blackstone Project
Studies in the Law of North Carolina
An imprint of North Carolina Law
5
Counties covered in this edition
2 of 5
Counties with no full-time local legal aid office
65%
Average share of eviction defendants appearing without counsel
1st
Edition — year-over-year change begins with the second
This first edition covers the five counties published in the North Carolina Courts section. Coverage expands automatically as more counties are added there — the Index is drawn from the same maintained county substrate, not a separate dataset. Year-over-year change begins with the second edition, once a prior year exists to compare against.
County data
| County | Local aid offices | Pro se (eviction) |
|---|---|---|
| Cumberland | 1 | 64% |
| Dare | 0 | 69% |
| Mecklenburg | 1 | 55% |
| Swain | 0 | 74% |
| Wake | 1 | 61% |
Why an index and not a report
A number per county, held to the same method every year, gives every local paper, county commission and legal aid board something to argue about. A narrative report gets read once. An index is the more useful civic object.
The rule that protects it
The method is frozen and published before data collection begins. If the method changes in a later edition, both years are restated under the new method rather than left inconsistent — a comparison across years is only honest if the ruler didn’t change.
access-to-justice-index-2026 · 1st edition
published 2026-03-16 · method frozen 2025-09-01
sources: NC Administrative Office of the Courts · Legal Aid of North Carolina · NC State Bar
all underlying data released as csv
grew out of the Access to Justice research programme
published 2026-03-16 · method frozen 2025-09-01
sources: NC Administrative Office of the Courts · Legal Aid of North Carolina · NC State Bar
all underlying data released as csv
grew out of the Access to Justice research programme
North Carolina Law · Public legal information
Reviewed
2026-03-16
Editor
The Blackstone Research Council
Supersedes