This paper integrates findings from legal needs studies, institutional economics, and interdisciplinary conflict research to develop a framework for analyzing dispute systems. Five essential tasks that a dispute system facilitates are identified and the basic technologies for supplying them....

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...

Negotiation theorists recommend that disputants look for objective criteria when they have to divide the pie. Using objective criteria to decide on the distributive issues may in fact be the only way out of costly negotiations based on personal feelings. The recommendation to use objective...

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...

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...

Rules are often seen as commands that have to be observed. From the perspective of disputants, however, rules may also be tools for settling disputes. Fisher, Ury, and Patton famously recommend that negotiators look for objective criteria instead of dividing the pie by a contest of willpower. We...

Victims of road traffic accidents often have great difficulty in recovering damages through the tort system. They spend time, incur costs, and experience uncertainty and stress. Victims regularly complain about treatment that is not consistent with procedural justice values such as respect,...