How to Measure the Price and Quality of Access to Justice?

Abstract

Citizens need access to a private or public mechanism that induces government officials and other citizens to respect their rights. They need 'paths to justice'. Walking these paths is costly. Disputants, for instance, spend money, time and effort when they bring their case forward in negotiations, in a court action, or in other dispute resolution procedures. In this paper, which presents the first results of a project aimed at developing tools for measuring access to justice, we explore how the price and quality of access to justice can be determined. We identify the issues that have to be resolved, and select a number of options to deal with these issues. Furthermore, we explore some of the difficulties that will arise during the development of an actual measurement framework.

Keywords: access to justice, procedure, dispute resolution

JEL Classification: D63, D73, D74, K40, K41, K42, O17