Abstract

A pervasive, yet largely unconsidered, feature of legal institutions is their use by states to generate revenue. I construct a series of formal-theoretic models to investigate how a state's use of its legal system for revenue generation interacts with other institutional and economic conditions to shape access to justice and the emergence of competition from private legal services providers. I find that states that value legal systems for revenue-generation will not provide fully accessible legal systems if administrative costs and inequality are high enough, even if they also value citizens' access to justice. Moreover, I demonstrate that when this feature is considered, the determinants of access become fundamentally different in poor and wealthy countries, and between poor and wealthy groups of citizens. In wealthy countries, systemic legal bias against the poor further decreases access to the legal system; in poor countries, however, such bias may increase it. In poor countries, economic growth increases both demand for and supply of property rights protections; in wealthy countries, growth may increase demand while decreasing supply. Finally, wealthy social groups pay hefty premiums for access to private legal institutions, while disadvantaged groups only prefer private legal services if they are much cheaper to access than the state.

Reference

Hannah Simpson, “Access to Justice in Revenue-Seeking Legal Institutions”, IAST Lunch Seminar, Toulouse: IAST, January 30, 2018, 12:45–13:45, room MF323.