Access to justice research: On the way to a broader perspective

Abstract

In this paper a baseline of contemporary access to justice research is established. The baseline clearly illustrates key features of the research field suggesting that while the field of research has become more multifaceted in the course of the last two or three decades, it is nevertheless very much dominated by law scholarship and structural analysis of legal service provision. Departing from this overview of access to justice research as of today, five calls for future research on access to justice explicated in the reviewed literature is presented and discussed. I argue that future research on access to justice should: 1) Reach a clearer understanding of the problem (of access to justice), 2) consider a multidisciplinary approach, 3) support and develop evidence-based policy by committing to empirical research, 4) study a wider variety of social realities and 5) look for quality. The reasonings of this paper are based on a scoping literature review.