People who experience a legal problem and pursue its resolution by a neutral person or neutral body have to deal with the costs and quality of legal procedures. High costs of reaching justice and factors related to the quality of procedures and outcomes might be perceived as barriers to access...

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...

Facilitadores Judiciales is a programme run by the Organization of the American States and the Nicaraguan judiciary. The main objective of the programme is to improve access to justice for the disadvantaged people in Nicaragua. From 1998 to 2010 the programme was implemented in almost all rural...

Facilitadores Judiciales is a programme run by the Organization of the American States and the Nicaraguan judiciary. The main objective of the programme is to improve access to justice for the disadvantaged people in Nicaragua. From 1998 to 2010 the progr

For a long time, the official justice mechanisms have been perceived as expensive and unaffordable for the majority of people. In this article, I review the literature on barriers to justice and contemplate the identified barriers as costs that users must spend on their paths to justice. The...

Legal problems and justice needs are similar in different jurisdictions and different locations. Processes for resolving them, as well as rules determining outcomes vary widely, however. Measuring the price (costs) and quality of such 'paths to justice' from the perspective of the user is likely...

Facilitadores Judiciales is a programme run by the Organization of the American States and the Nicaraguan judiciary. The main objective of the programme is to improve access to justice for the disadvantaged people in Nicaragua. From 1998 to 2010 the programme was implemented in almost all rural...

The methods and procedures for measuring the performance of a legal system are debatable issues. Legal indexes, although not common, do exist as a means for measurement and evaluation of various legal phenomena. This paper outlines one method using the Access to Justice Index, which is a...

In this paper we study the legal needs of groups of vulnerable people in five developing countries: Azerbaijan, Mali, Rwanda, Egypt and Bangladesh. Our first objective is to explore the legal problems which are encountered by vulnerable people in these societies. Second, our study looks at the...