Understanding the Market for Justice

If justice is so dearly needed, why does it not emerge spontaneously? Socio-legal research shows how people shop for justice. They approach friends, advisers, lawyers, mediators, suppliers of legal information, local authorities, community leaders, priests, imams, arbiters, or judges in order to obtain redress in situations of conflict. From the perspective of clients, law is probably not so much a system of procedures in which they face barriers to access, but a variety of options on a market for justice services. In this paper, five types of justice services are distinguished. Whether these services are affordable for clients and sustainable to supply, depends on the costs of production and on the transaction costs of making them available. Investigating the sources of transaction costs for each of these justice services improves our understanding of the legal system. This perspective explains why ADR has hardly succeeded in attracting clients, lawyer services are unlikely to become a commodity, norms for distributive issues are often lacking, and courts have trouble to orient themselves on the needs of their customers. It also indicates which type of policies governments and civil society can consider if they wish to improve access to justice.