(Reuters) -

Justice reform advocates are pushing President Joe Biden's administration to re-establish a novel office within the U.S. Department of Justice that sought to improve access to legal services and preserve the rights of underprivileged Americans.

The Office for Access to Justice was a 2010 initiative by then-U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to address the justice gap and related issues. President Barack Obama established it as a formal component of DOJ in 2015.

Nearly a million poor people who seek help for essential legal matters – eviction and foreclosure, domestic violence abuse and child abuse issues - are turned away because of inadequate resources, according to the Legal Services Corporation. The bipartisan government nonprofit issued a 2017 report finding that "eighty-six percent of the civil legal problems faced by low-income Americans in a given year receive inadequate or no legal help."

The Office of Access to Justice worked for eight years to strengthen the right to counsel for indigent criminal defendants and people facing various civil actions, filing amicus briefs and statements of interests in lawsuits, guiding states in reforming onerous court fines, and establishing the White House Legal Aid Interagency Roundtable - a group spanning 22 agencies that collaborated on policy to address legal aid issues throughout the federal government.

In 2018, former President Donald Trump's administration shut down the office, but kept the regulations establishing the office on the books. Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions transferred its duties to DOJ's Office of Legal Policy, which held some periodic meetings - but the division was effectively closed.

As the push to reestablish the Office grows with a new administration, lawmakers including U.S. Representative Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) have also proposed legislation to codify the office's existence, which would prevent future administrations from sidelining its mission.

I talked about the division's work, its effective closure, and its potential future with Maha Jweied and Karen Lash, both of whom served in various leadership roles at the division since its inception in 2010. Lash served as acting director and left in 2017, and Jweied held the same post afterward, until she left in 2018 when the Office was closed. Both are now senior fellows at the Center for American Progress. Here's our conversation, edited for brevity and clarity:

HK: I've thought of the office as being "effectively closed" under Trump. How do you regard what happened in 2018?

Karen Lash: There was actually a formal closure of the office. There was an Office of Management and Budget directive to shrink government, and this was one of the products. The office was created through notification to Congress - a new organization chart gets shared, a regulation gets promulgated, et cetera. The reverse happened to close it: They notified Congress, they deleted the office of Access to Justice on the organization chart, and they informed Congress they'd "moved" the work to the Office of Legal Policy.

HK: What would you say are the "big ticket" items the office worked on or accomplished before then?

KL: What we found is that civil legal aid is a well-kept secret. But if you want to break the cycle of domestic violence, the literature says you have to include access to justice services, same if you want to increase the chances somebody gets a job or housing. You need legal services alongside other services. So I would say launching the Legal Aid Interagency Round table. The big idea there is that there are government programs and policies designed to increase opportunities in employment or housing and more, and they'll be more effective when they include legal aid. For example, we know based on a number of studies that wages and employment go up and recidivism goes down when people with a record get it expunged. That means workforce programs should include civil legal help for people with records, if we want them to work. It's about access to justice, but also about an evidence-based approach to government.

HK: How was your ongoing work affected by the closing?

KL: I think the best example is that Sessions rescinded two guidance documents in 2017. One helped state courts administer fines more fairly, generally, and another dealt with fines connected to juveniles' cases.

Maha Jweied : There's a whole bunch of things that didn't happen. Even when decisions were made above us, having our voice in the room was very important, so I think about what didn't get done in that void.

HK: Did anything change under Barr?

KL: No.

HK: What do you hope for the future of the office, if it's reestablished under Biden? (The White House didn't respond to my questions for this column.)

MJ: First, while we think protecting the office from future closure through legislation is important. The Biden administration doesn't have to wait for legislation to reestablish it. In the wake of both the pandemic and a heightened awareness of the racial disparities throughout the justice system, this is a critical component to resurrect to help coordinate responses to the incoming tsunami of evictions - which disproportionately affect Black and Latino families - and other civil and criminal issues people are facing.

KL: That's especially true now when faith in our justice system is so frayed, even shredded. There's a really important role to play for an office like this in restoring that faith.