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A public reference institution of the State of North Carolina's law

North Carolina Law
Research

A question, not a pitch.

Six standing programmes, each leading with what is unresolved. Findings are released whether or not they support the approach we started with — see Research Note 14 for an example.

The Blackstone Project
This section is home to The Blackstone Project, North Carolina Law’s research institute. Its research is never conducted, reviewed, or published in a way that favors a North Carolina Law commercial offering, present or future. More about the Project.

Programmes

Legal Literacy

How plainly written legal information changes what people understand and are able to do.

Does a lower reading level change what a reader is able to act on, or only how quickly they read it?

1 note · 1 initiative
Plain-Language Drafting

Restating statutes and legal text at a lower reading level without losing what a court would rely on.

Can a statute be restated at a grade-eight reading level without losing anything a court would rely on?

0 notes · 1 initiative
Court Technology

Tools that make court processes and information easier to navigate, evaluated before they are relied on.

Does a tool that makes a court calendar easier to read actually change whether people show up?

0 notes · 1 initiative
Digital Evidence

How courts and litigants handle evidence that exists only in digital form.

What does authenticating a screenshot or a text thread actually require, and does current practice meet that bar?

0 notes · 0 initiatives
Access to Justice

What determines whether someone without a lawyer can complete a legal process on their own.

Which specific points in a self-represented filing are where people actually give up?

1 note · 0 initiatives
Read the Access to Justice Index →
Responsible AI in Law

Where AI-assisted tools are safe to use in legal work, and the safeguards that make them safe.

Can an AI-assisted drafting tool be trusted with citations at all, or only with a human check on every one?

0 notes · 1 initiative

Initiatives

initiative-01research
Court Calendar Reader

A test of whether translating a county's raw court calendar into plain-language session listings changes whether people actually show up.

initiative-02internal
Citation Integrity Check

An internal safeguard that checks every statutory citation on the platform against the current General Statutes before publication.

initiative-03ongoing
Reading-Level Audit

A standing, ongoing measurement of the reading grade level of every published Library article, checked against the grade-eight target.

initiative-04pilot
Plain-Language Statute Companion

An experiment in whether a statute can be restated at a grade-eight reading level without losing anything a court would rely on.

Research Notes

Research Note 14
Lowering reading level did not change filing behaviour
negative result
Research Note 9
A single-page instructions insert increased pro se filing completion
positive result