Victor D. Quintanilla is a Professor of Law and Val Nolan Faculty Fellow at the Indiana University (IU) Maurer School of Law and an Affiliated Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. Prof. Quintanilla is an IU Equity Accelerator (EA) Faculty Research Fellow leading the EA’s access-to-justice initiatives. He researches civil justice design and access to justice by drawing on theory and methods within the field of social psychology, including experiments and interventions conducted with judges, lawyers, law students, and the public. He harnesses psychological methods to examine the experiences of unrepresented persons in court proceedings, particularly vulnerable minorities, and members of disadvantaged groups.
Prof. Quintanilla has written several articles on people-centered civil justice design and conducted studies measuring the legal needs of unrepresented persons and their experiences of civil justice, including a recent pathbreaking report, Accessing Justice with Zoom: Experiences and Outcomes in Online Civil Courts, which provides an evidence-base to understand the experiences of unrepresented persons in online civil courts. He designs and evaluates interventions that improve access to justice for unrepresented persons in court proceedings. Prof. Quintanilla earned a JD from Georgetown University Law Center (2005) and is a PhD candidate in social psychology at Indiana University. He served as a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University (2015-2016) and an American Bar Foundation / JPB Foundation, Access to Justice Fellow (2020-2022). His research has received funding from the American Bar Foundation, AccessLex Institute, the Character Lab, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and Schmidt Futures.