Jim Greiner
The Honorable S. William Green Professor of Public Law
Faculty Director, Access to Justice Lab

Jim is the Honorable S. William Green Professor of Public Law. He teaches courses on civil procedure, expert witnesses, and access to justice. Before coming to the law school in 2007, Jim completed his Ph.D. in statistics at Harvard University. Prior to this, Jim practiced law for six years, three for the Department of Justice (Federal Programs Branch), and three for Jenner & Block, LLC. He tried to focus his practice on employment discrimination, voting rights, and the Decennial Census, but alas, he also had to learn how airplanes get on and off aircraft carriers (in the A-12 litigation), as well as how to deal with structural injunctions in long-running housing desegregation cases. Jim’s research focuses on the Access to Justice Lab, where he serves as Faculty Director. The Access to Justice Lab implements randomized field experiments to find out what works for individuals and families who cannot afford to hire lawyers. The Access to Justice Lab is the only entity in the United States that focuses on randomized control trials in the legal profession.
Representative Publications
-
Favorite
D. James Greiner, Cassandra W. Pattanayak & Jonathan P. Hennessy, The Limits of Unbundled Legal Assistance: A Randomized Study in a Massachusetts District Court and Prospects for the Future 126 Harv. L. Rev. 903 (2013). -
Favorite
D. James Greiner & Cassandra Wolos Pattanayak, Randomized Evaluation in Legal Assistance: What Difference Does Representation (Offer and Actual Use) Make?, 121 Yale L.J. 2118 (2012). - D. James Greiner, Renee Danser & Andy Gu, Online Dispute Resolution of Low-Level Court Proceedings: Two Broken Field Experiments, One Unexpected Result, ssrn.com, (Mar. 7, 2023)
- D. James Greiner, Hannah Crowe & Renee Danser, Record-Clearing as a Rite of Passage To Engage in the Justice System (Mar. 7, 2023).
- D. James Greiner, Ellen Lee Degnan, Thomas Ferriss & Roseanna Sommers, Using Random Assignment to Measure Court Accessibility for Low-Income Divorce Seekers, 118 Proc. of the Nat'l Acad. of Sci. (Apr. 6, 2021).