Whitney K. Taylor (San Francisco State University) has posted The Paradoxical Effects of Increased Access to Justice on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This paper tackles an intentionally provocative question: is there such thing as too much access to justice? Conventional wisdom suggests that barriers to access to justice ought to be low. Countless reform efforts put in place throughout the world have sought to increase access to justice and strengthen judicial institutions. What happens when access to these institutions is increased? Who takes advantage of that access? Who is left behind? This paper shows how lowering material barriers to access to justice can have paradoxical effects, (1) handcuffing judges, (2) incentivizing claim-making on some issues while inhibiting claim-making on others, and (3) reinforcing existing inequalities. Turning to in-depth interviews and descriptive statistics, this paper explores the effects of a radical experiment in increasing access to justice in Colombia, the introduction of the acción de tutela.