Legal Aid, Accessible Courts or Legal Information? Three Access to Justice Strategies Compared
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Maurits Barendrecht
Access to justice can be enhanced in many ways. What is the most effective way to do this, given limited resources? Three perspectives are used to compare access to justice policies: (1) costs and benefits, (2) transaction costs (diminishing market failure and government failure), and (3) legal empowerment (enhancing people’s control over their lives and their bargaining position). The analysis suggests that legal information and education strategies should have a higher priority, followed by improving access to (informal) adjudication. Civil legal aid on an individual basis is a rather costly strategy. Moreover, legal aid is less likely to create just outcomes on its own: a judge without a lawyer is more valuable than a lawyer without a judge.
©2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Topics Article
- Understanding Akzo Nobel: A Comparison of the Status of In-House Counsel, the Scope of the Attorney-Client Privilege, and Discovery in the U.S. and Europe
- Women and Malaysian Islamic Family Law: Exploring the Gender Sensitive Path of Jurisprudential Reform
- Game Theory as a Yardstick for Antitrust Leniency Policy: the US, EU, and Italian Experiences in a Comparative Perspective
- Legal Aid, Accessible Courts or Legal Information? Three Access to Justice Strategies Compared
- Advances Article
- Against the Poor: Homelessness in U.S. Law
- The Principle of Neutrality and "Islamic International Law" (Siyar)
