46
Legal organizations mapped
In Pennsylvania, there is one legal-aid lawyer for every 6,415 people living in poverty. This project gathers 46 verified public-interest legal organizations serving the Philadelphia community into a single interactive map and directory — so that finding the right help is a matter of minutes, not luck.
People facing eviction, deportation, the denial of benefits, or domestic violence are entitled to legal services that protect their interests. Yet the organizations offering that help are scattered across dozens of institutions, intake rules, and neighborhoods — a landscape that is difficult to navigate precisely when navigating it matters most.
That scarcity stretches the capacity of community-driven lawyers to reach the people who need them. This project responds at the level it can affect directly: it makes verified information about quality legal services easier to find, compare, and act upon. Sitting at the intersection of law and the digital humanities, it treats data curation, spatial analysis, and interface design as instruments for arguing against the inequitable distribution of justice — consolidating a fragmented network of providers into a coherent map of the legal fields available to the Philadelphia community.
Beyond the nonprofits and clinics, the directory includes a bar-association referral service, a state government agency, and a community mediation center. Each organization is recorded with its nearest SEPTA station and line, languages offered, hours, walk-in and hotline availability, and full contact information — 24 attributes in all. Areas of practice span:
Every organization appears as a pin over Philadelphia. Click a pin to read a short summary — what kind of help the organization offers, its hours, and how to reach it — without leaving the map.
A scrollable card for every organization sits alongside the map. Type into the search box to narrow the list instantly by ZIP code, area of practice, language, or transit line.
Selecting an organization shows the closest transit station and line, the approximate distance from you, and one-click links that open driving or walking directions, already filled in.
map ↔ listThe two halves stay in sync: clicking a pin highlights its card in the directory, and clicking a card flies the map to that organization and opens its details.
The directory is encoded as GeoJSON, the open standard (RFC 7946) for representing geographic features as JSON. Each organization is modeled as a Feature with a point geometry and a properties object capturing its name, service type, area of practice, address, transit proximity, languages, hours, hotline availability, and contact information.
Structuring the data this way separates the content from the interface, a core digital-humanities practice: the same dataset can drive the map, a tabular analysis, or future research without modification. The application is built on the Leaflet.js mapping library across three coordinated layers, and uses a tiered data-loading strategy that falls back to a local copy and degrades gracefully rather than failing silently.
Browse, search, and get directions to all 46 organizations on the live map and directory.
Open the map ↗The full directory as a spreadsheet — 46 organizations across 24 documented fields. Preview and download below.
See the data ↓The data architecture, interface design, and a plain-language guide to how the resource was built.
Read the method →| Organization | Area of Practice | Address | Nearest SEPTA | Multilingual | 24/7 Hotline |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AIDS Law Project of Pennsylvania | Discrimination, health care, civil law | 1211 Chestnut Street, Suite 600 Philadelphia, PA 19107 | 13th St Station, Jefferson Station | Yes | No |
| American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Pennsylvania | Protecting constitutional civil liberties | P.O. Box 60173 Philadelphia, PA 19102 | Suburban Station | No | No |
| Community Legal Services of Philadelphia | Housing, governmental benefits, utilities | 1424 Chestnut Street Philadelphia, PA 19102 | 15th St Station & City Hall | Yes | No |
| Consumer Bankruptcy Assistance Project | Consumer debt and Chapter 7 bankruptcy | 718 Arch Street, Suite 300N Philadelphia, PA 19106 | 8th St Station | No | No |
| CORA Good Shepherd Mediation | Youth services, restorative justice practices | 8540 Verree Road Philadelphia, PA 19111 | Fox Chase Station | No | No |
| Disability Rights Pennsylvania | Disability discrimination | 1800 JFK Boulevard, Suite 900 Philadelphia, PA 19103 | Suburban Station | No | No |
| Drexel University Kline School of Law — Federal Litigation & Appeals Clinic | Immigration proceedings, civil, criminal | 3320 Market Street, Suite 411 Philadelphia, PA 19104 | 34th St Station | No | No |
This tool would not have been possible without the people and institutions who guided and supported it along the way.
I want to personally thank Ben Liebersohn for his hard work and dedication in helping me learn and develop this software. This tool would not have been possible without our weekly meetings.
A special thank-you to Penn Libraries for welcoming us into their spaces and for their support throughout the project.
Thank you to the Price Lab for Digital Humanities for hosting Dream Lab and for their unwavering support and guidance throughout this journey. I have learned so much, and I cannot wait to continue our partnership. Thank you, J.D. Porter, Stewart Varner, and Emily Brooks.
To my mentor, professor, and friend: thank you, Professor English, for your motivation and your willingness to pursue this project. Words cannot express my gratitude, and I truly appreciate everything you have done for me. Thank you so much.
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