Best Practices for an Affordable and Sustainable Dispute System: A Toolbox for Microjustice

Abstract

Many people lack access to justice for urgent legal needs, although the value of protection of their rights is high. Can justice be affordable for people with less than 2$ a day to spend? Access to justice studies usually investigate the barriers to justice and suggest ways to remove them. This paper follows an alternative approach. Justice is seen as a set of goods that must be produced and delivered by people to other people. For access to justice to become available, five key dispute resolution tasks should be facilitated by services performed at costs that are affordable to users. The paper collects best practices that can be derived from the disciplines that study disputes. It sketches how they may be combined in a low cost dispute system ran by a "Microjustice Facilitator'. The conclusion is that these five essential services are not inherently costly to produce for people with limited resources, although there are still many gaps in our knowledge about providing them efficiently, which calls for coordinated innovation processes. It is also likely that the transaction costs associated to delivering justice are part of the problem and the market for justice should be studied more thoroughly.

Growing Justice: Justice Policies and Transaction Costs

“…A third category of conflicts emerges from contracts between buyers and sellers, or from obligations of the bureaucracy to its citizens. Here, the issues are mostly what the plaintiff could expect (interpretation of contracts and of applicable regulation), how the defendant contributed to these expectations by giving or withholding information (duties to inform), and whether the defendant delivered goods or behavior that live up to the legitimate expectations of the plaintiff (Barendrecht 2009).…”

“…A first, intuitive understanding of justice services would probably distinguish two basic types: legal advice and neutral, third party interventions. But from the interdisciplinary literature on conflicts, dispute system design (Ury, Brett et al 1988;Costantino and Sickles Merchant 1996;Menkel-Meadow 1996;Bendersky 2003;Barendrecht 2008;Bingham 2008;Bordone 2008;Barendrecht 2009), institutional design and legal procedure, five necessary and sufficient dispute resolution tasks can be derived. In essence, justice services help clients to perform these five tasks.…”

“…Dispute system design is still a young discipline, but there is a beginning of a common understanding of "what works" in order to perform these five basic types of services (Ury, Brett et al 1988;Wall Jr and Callister 1995;Tyler 1997;Wall, Stark et al 2001;Bendersky 2003;Bingham 2008;Bordone 2008;Barendrecht 2009;Wall Jr and Chan-Serafin 2009). These best practices can build on years of conflict research by social psychologists, economists, and socio-legal researchers (Barendrecht 2009 We may probably assume that the basic justice technologies are now sufficiently developed. If justice is out of reach for many people, the cause is unlikely to be that justice providers do not know what to do for their clients, or face high costs of interventions.…”

“…Each way of organizing transactions, either through the market or through goverments, has its costs and the challenge is to minimize these costs (Williamson 1999;Rao 2003;Brousseau and Raynaud 2006). Table 2 gives an overview of transaction cost problems that are likely to occur in justice markets (Barendrecht 2009). Each of the five types of dispute resolution services that a plaintiff needs, has its own characteristics that lead to certain transaction cost problems.…”

“…Many people have to cooperate to make this happen. These complementarities, network-effects, or connected transactions require an integrated approach (Barendrecht 2009).…”