Cayley Balser

Cayley Balser (she/her) is the Director of Research at Innovation for Justice (i4J) and a Professor of Practice at the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law. Cayley has worked with i4J since Fall 2020 and has experience working in all three of i4J’s impact areas – Service, System, and Structure. As the Director of Research, Cayley’s role is to implement and teach trauma-informed, community-engaged, project-based courses applying participatory action research and design and systems thinking methodologies to legal empowerment and access to justice projects. Through this work, Cayley connects with community members, plans and oversees interviews and surveys, and works with students on qualitative and quantitative data collection, analysis, and synthesis. In the past five years, Cayley has interacted with over 1,250 community co-researchers and over 80 research team members. 

Her multidisciplinary research interests focus on access to and integration of trauma-informed approaches within legal education and services. She is indebted to the community members who share their time, lived-experience expertise, and energy with her to make this research and work possible. Cayley earned her J.D. from the University of Arizona College of Law in May 2022, graduating Cum Laude and receiving the Hon. Earl H. Carroll Public Service Award. Cayley was nominated for and joined the Legal Service Corporation’s Emerging Leaders Council in May 2024 and is a member of the State Bar of Arizona’s Access to Justice Committee. She is a licensed attorney in both Arizona and North Carolina.

Prior to law school, Cayley earned Master of Education (M.Ed.) and Education Specialist (Ed.S.) degrees in Mental Health Counseling from the University of Florida and is a National Certified Counselor (NCC). Her area of focus as a clinician was suicide prevention, trauma, and substance use. She designed and implemented intervention programs on various scales and presented her work at regional and national conferences. She attended Clemson University where she was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa and earned a B.A. in Psychology. Cayley also earned a Certification in Trauma-Informed Higher Education from Case Western Reserve University’s Center on Trauma and Adversity in 2026. She currently is pursuing an Education Doctorate (Ed.D.) at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill with a concentration in Organizational Learning and Leadership and a dissertation focus on trauma-informed legal pedagogy. 

Education

• B.A., Clemson University, 2016 
• M.Ed., Ed.S., University of Florida, 2019 
• J.D., James E. Rogers College of Law, University of Arizona, 2022 – Cum Laude