Measuring Access to Justice: The Quality of Outcomes

Abstract

In this paper, we present a shortlist of criteria and questionnaire items that can be used to evaluate the quality of outcomes of legal procedures and other paths to justice. We define a path to justice as a commonly applied process that users address in order to cope with a legal problem. In our analysis such a path to justice begins when the user first addresses the process and ends at the moment of an outcome. This can be a final decision by a neutral, a joint agreement by the parties, or an end to the process because one of the parties quits the process. Our measurement instrument aims to assess the quality of this outcome from the perspective of the persons using paths to justice. Criteria only are put on our shortlist if (a) they are regularly proposed in theoretical (normative) literature and (b) empirical research confirms that a substantial part of the population actually uses them to evaluate the outcomes of processes that give access to justice. We draw the criteria for our shortlist from the literature on theories of justice as diverse as distributive justice, restorative justice, corrective justice, retributive justice, transformative justice, legal pragmatism, and formal justice. The proposed criteria and items are intended to become part of a methodology for measuring the price and quality of access to justice from a user's perspective. The paper ends with a discussion of some of the (methodological) challenges: the problems associated with neutral evaluations of outcomes, the ambiguity of outcomes, and the relative weight of each criterion in different settings.