What are the Obstacles to Access to Justice?

The following resources pertain to the morning session of the virtual conference, Untangling the Obstacles for Equal Justice in Family Law. 

Presenters include Lonni Summers, Access to Justice; Barbara Babb, University of Baltimore; Javaneh Poukarim, Montgomery County Legal Aid; and Rebecca Snyder, PsyD. The moderator for this presentation is Jonathan Rosenthal, Esquire.

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Presentation Materials

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Presenters

Lonni Sumers, Esquire is a senior program manager with the Maryland Judiciary’s Access to Justice group. She works with courts and non-profit legal services providers to support programs that enhance access to justice. Lonni’s professional experience includes managing the consumer law unit at a Baltimore non-profit, training and supervising law students who represent tenants in rent court in Washington D.C. and staffing the award-winning District Court Self-Help Resource Center. Lonni is a former legal services attorney and has dedicated her career to addressing barriers to justice. She is a graduate of Drexel University’s Thomas R. Kline School of Law.

Professor Barbara Babb, founder and director of the Sayra and Neil Meyerhoff Center for Families, Children and the Courts (CFCC) and director of the Post-J.D. Certificate in Family Law, joined the University of Baltimore School of Law faculty in 1989 after three years as managing attorney of the Domestic Law Unit at the Legal Aid Bureau in Baltimore, Maryland. Prior to that, she was in private practice for several years with a law firm in New York. Babb teaches several courses in the family law area. Her scholarship focuses on an interdisciplinary, holistic approach to family law and family justice system reform through the application of therapeutic jurisprudence, the ecology of human development, and the creation of unified family courts. She is the author (with Judith D. Moran) of Caring for Families in Court: An Essential Approach to Family Justice (2019), a book that envisions the family court as a care center. In 2016, the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts (AFCC) appointed Professor Babb editor-in-chief of the Family Court Review. She is an Advisory Board member of the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System’s (IAALS) Family Justice Program. Babb also serves on the Curriculum Committee of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges (NCJFCJ). She was awarded the 2015 Stanley Cohen Distinguished Research Award by AFCC and was designated a Human Rights and Justice Champion by Maryland Legal Aid in 2011. Babb is a member of the New York and Maryland bars.

Javaneh Pourkarim, Esquire has been a staff attorney at Maryland Legal Aid for over five years. Prior to that, she was a staff attorney at Pine Tree Legal Assistance in Maine. In her years as an attorney, she has assisted hundreds of low-income Marylanders. Her current practice consists of elder and family law, focusing on divorce and custody trials, and Medicaid and involuntary nursing home discharge hearings. She was admitted to the Maryland Bar in May of 2012 and is passionate about access to justice and human rights issues. She has dedicated her career to public service. She is bilingual and fluent in Farsi/Persian. She is the co-chair of the Law & Aging Task Force at Maryland Legal Aid, the vice president of the DC Chapter of the Iranian American Bar Association, and the co-chair of the Administrative Law section of the Bar Association of Montgomery County.

Rebecca L. Snyder, Psy.D. is a licensed psychologist in private practice in Frederick, Maryland. Her practice centers around providing psychological services to children, parents and families. These services include forensic consultation, evaluations including custody evaluations, psychological and brief focused evaluations, as well as parenting coordination and specialized family therapy for court involved families.

Moderator

Jonathan S. Rosenthal, Esquire, is the Director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) ADR Division. The mission of the FEMA ADR Division parallels that of FEMA: Helping people before, during, and after a conflict. Accordingly, Jonathan leads the 70+ ADR professionals in the Division to help FEMA employees and its stakeholders across the country manage, resolve, and prepare for conflict so they can refocus their collective attention on the existing disasters.

Prior to moving to FEMA, Jonathan served as the Director of the Maryland Judiciary’s Mediation and Conflict Resolution Office (MACRO). MACRO’s mission is to collaborate with stakeholders statewide to promote the availability, use, and quality of ADR throughout Maryland. Jonathan was responsible for increasing the profile and understanding of ADR in Maryland courts, educating those within the Judiciary and the general public on the benefits and uses of ADR, and creating and supporting high quality ADR programs with funding and technical expertise.

Jonathan also served as the Executive Director of ADR Programs for the District Court of Maryland, where he worked to expand, analyze, and improve ADR programs in the District Court, and support a roster of more than 325 ADR practitioners. He started his work in the Maryland Judiciary as MACRO’s first Court ADR Resources Director. He is an adjunct professor teaching negotiation, arbitration, and mediation at Anne Arundel Community College, and he has taught mediation in the Clinical Law Program at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law.

Jonathan practiced law for more than 10 years before focusing his attention on ADR. He has served the field through leadership positions, including as Chair of the ADR Section of the Maryland State Bar Association (2004‐05).

In 2015, Jonathan was honored to be the recipient of the Robert M. Bell Award for Outstanding Contribution to ADR in Maryland, presented by the MSBA ADR Section. In 2017, Jonathan received the Community Mediation Maryland (CMM) Bridge Builder Award, which highlighted his commitment, service, and support of community mediation and court partnerships.

In addition to being an MCDR performance‐based certified mediator, Jonathan is trained in facilitative and transformative mediation, collaborative law, arbitration, large group and public policy facilitation, sociocratic decision making, and other collaborative processes, and he has experience practicing in all of these areas.

Jonathan can be reached at 202-212-7127 or Jonathan.Rosenthal@fema.dhs.gov