Global Program on Justice and Rule of Law

In a first-of-its-kind JUPITER assessment, a standardized methodology is used to benchmark the state and performance of Liberia’s judiciary against specific measures of effectiveness and to compare key features across countries. The study focuses on the effectiveness of the system in service delivery in three areas – access to justice, efficiency, and quality – and presents the main challenges that emerged from the empirical work to provide data-informed context-specific suggestions for reform. Read more

With the benefit of a quarter century of empirical research, this paper finds that judicial reform is successful in improving court effectiveness when it coincides with or is motivated by periods of extraordinary politics. The paper studies the four most discussed ingredients of judicial effectiveness—independence, access, efficiency, and quality—and finds that transformative judicial reform is most likely to succeed in countries emerging from conflict and violence or those that are pursuing accession to regional or international groups. Read more

By 2030, more than half of the world’s extreme poor will live in countries characterized by fragility, conflict, and violence. In fragile and conflict-affected situations (FCS), justice systems face numerous challenges that hinder their effectiveness and prevent reconstruction and adequate service delivery, including lack of independence, heightened corruption, improper government influence, and systemic institutional and administrative problems. Strengthening the delivery of justice and improving people’s capacity to access justice ensures the rule of law is equally enforced, thereby promoting social and economic development. Read More

Evidence from high-income countries suggests that judges often exhibit in-group bias, favoring litigants that share an identity with the judge. However, there is little evidence on this phenomenon from the Global South. Collecting the available universe of High Court decisions in Kenya, this paper leverages the random assignment of cases to judges to evaluate the existence of in-group bias along gender and ethnic lines. Read More

Bihar is widely regarded as one of India's poorest and most divided states. It has also been the site of many social movements that have left indelible marks on the state's politics and identity. Little is currently known about how structural inequalities have affected the functioning of formal systems of justice in the state. This paper uses a novel dataset of more than one million cases filed at the Patna high court between 2009 and 2019 together with a variety of supplementary data to analyze the role of religion, caste and gender in the high court of Bihar. Read More

This paper summarizes the empirical evidence on the role of justice in economic development, conflict, and trust in institutions. It finds that justice institutions play a significant role in economic development, particularly through their impact on credit markets and firm growth, the protection of vulnerable populations, their capacity to deter violence, and their influence over people's trust in formal institutions. The paper then considers the promise of administrative data, machine learning, and randomized controlled trials to enhance the efficiency, access, and quality of justice. The paper concludes by discussing new avenues for research and the potential for data to improve the functioning of justice systems in the age of COVID-19. Read More

Disruptive technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) offer new opportunities to governments facing development challenges, especially now as fiscal stress is causing many governments to find new solutions to improving services without increasing the costs. The paper curates knowledge residing in public documents and aims to distill lessons learned on how to adopt and use AI as part of a public sector modernization strategy. The paper’s primary scope is on governance-related aspects. Read More

Can procedural reforms improve judicial efficiency? And do improvements in judicial efficiency benefit firms? The authors study a reform that gave judges in Senegal the powers to desk reject cases and the responsibility to complete pre-trials within four months. They combine three years of hearing-level caseload data and monthly firm tax filings with the staggered roll-out of the reform to produce three key results. Read More

Community-based paralegalism has been active in the Philippines for the past 30 years, and yet its contribution to access to justice and the advancement of the rights and entitlements of the poor has been largely undocumented. This paper attempts to provide a framework study on the history, nature, and scope of paralegal work in the Philippines, based on the experience of 12 organizations that are active in the training and development of community-oriented paralegals. Read More

This paper examines the current status of justice and dispute-resolution mechanisms in Bangladesh, ranging from the formal justice system to the traditional shalish (a form of dispute resolution), and focuses on the costs and benefits of utilizing nongovernmental organization (NGO)-led legal services programs as an alternative form of justice delivery and dispute resolution for the poor, with a focus on women and girls. Read More

Paralegals provide a crucial link to justice services and legal redress in South Africa, particularly for the rural poor. Although post-Apartheid constitutional reforms guaranteed a broad range of rights and benefits to all South Africans, including the right to legal assistance, accessing many of these benefits remains a challenge for those who live in remote areas and those who cannot afford legal representation. Read More

Island courts have been in operation in Vanuatu since 1984. Official documents have hitherto provided little information on their practical operations or utility, and our preliminary research in 2010 found that not much was known at the state governance level about their real circumstances. In 2011, we conducted fieldwork research on five islands, Efate, Santo, Malekula, Epi, and Tanna, to provide better information on the practical operations of island courts and their use by ni-Vanuatu. Read More

It has become increasingly clear that courts across the globe must do more to better organize and manage their caseload and that automation alone is not the answer. In response to this need, case flow management has emerged to become the central method of promoting greater court responsibility and accountability for efficient case processing. Read More

Court specialization is commonly considered to be an important reform initiative to advance the development of a successful judicial system. Court specialization is thought useful even to address broader development constraints, such as the need for more effective access to contract enforcement, improvements in the investment climate, or more adequate protection of the environment. Read More

This paper was developed as one such companion piece to the updated GAC Strategy 2012. The Strategy commits the Bank to putting in place a revised approach to strengthening justice systems, which it defines as a critical element of any country’s institutional system. 'New Directions in Justice Reform' constitutes the Bank’s first institution-wide approach to justice reform, and as such introduces the revised approach to justice reform to which the Bank is committed under its Updated GAC Strategy. Read More

Initiatives in Justice Reform is a compendium of World Bank-financed activities in justice reform that has been published by the World Bank in seven editions since 2000. This eighth volume of Initiatives in Justice Reform presents brief summaries of World Bank justice reform projects, grants, and research by region and by country, in alphabetical order. In their totality, these descriptions highlight the breadth of the Bank‘s work in this critical field of development. Read More

This spoken presentation profiles the efforts of the Supreme Court of Afghanistan to produce effective plans for developing that court and the judicial system in general. It offers an assessment of the limits of financial assistance by donors in bringing about rapid improvements in the quality of the judiciary. Read More

The justice sector in Mongolia has changed significantly in the 20 years since the country became a democracy. From the very beginning, the World Bank and other international partners have provided significant assistance to reform processes, particularly in areas concerned with the development of an independent judiciary. Especially in comparison to other countries in the region, Mongolia's reform efforts have been generally successful. Read More

This article outlines a range of special responses to detect, remedy, and prevent corruption within prosecution offices. While not entirely specific to prosecution agencies, the approaches outlined highlight the central importance of good management practices and a strong focus on preventing opportunities for corruption through effective policies and procedures, IT solutions, and transparent operations. Read More

Law and the culture of law find their expression in the many facets of the law's institutions. One of the most visible of these is the architecture of the places in which the legal process is enacted. Through architecture it is possible to communicate widely variant cultural perspectives on the rule of law. In contemporary Australia, an advanced and successful democracy, Aboriginal families continue to experience grossly disproportionate incarceration rates in the justice and correctional institutional systems, often in demonstrably inappropriate environments. Read More

The role of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) in efforts to strengthen the rule of law is attracting increased interest in international development cooperation. From a development perspective, the principal interest in this question is a concern for expanding rights and opportunities for poor people who do not fully benefit from the protection of the law in their daily lives. Read More

This paper examines three systems of courts of justice, each in a different country in the region of South Pacific islands known as Melanesia, where state legal systems have been adopted from former European colonial governments. The systems discussed are, by comparison, 'hybrid', each of them having been established with the intention of addressing disputes among small-scale social groups by less formal means or by taking greater heed of customary forms of dispute resolution. Read More

This paper reviews the World Bank's existing work in access to justice and suggests directions for further Bank engagement in this area. Accesses to justice efforts are grouped here into six categories: court reforms, legal aid, information dissemination and education, alternative dispute resolution, public sector accountability, and research. The paper is motivated in part by recent discussions of 'legal empowerment;' a thread of inquiry that runs through the review is: how do World Bank efforts to increase access to justice affect the agency of poor people? Read More

This paper develops a framework and some hypotheses regarding the impact of local-level, informal legal institutions on three economic outcomes: aggregate growth, inequality, and human capabilities. It presents a set of stylized differences between formal and informal legal justice systems, identifies the pathways through which formal systems promote economic outcomes, reflects on what the stylized differences mean for the potential impact of informal legal institutions on economic outcomes, and looks at extant case studies to examine the plausibility of the arguments presented. Read More

The conflicting relationship between peace and justice is frequently debated in the field of transitional justice. The obligation to prosecute serious crimes can contradict the measures necessary to reestablish peace among society. The predicament gives rise to a similar, though less obvious, challenge in many developing countries, where the formal justice system can be at odds with conflict management initiatives. Read More

A significant proportion of the world's work is done in contexts where the rule of law is absent or severely lacking. This paper describes one such context, that of contemporary Cambodia. Based on a literature review and interviews with key informants the authors find that there are opportunities to embed labor markets in regulatory frameworks, even at the periphery of the global economy. In such contexts, however, it is suggested that orthodox models of legal and judicial reform, which focus on drafting better laws and building capacity in judicial and administrative institutions for their enforcement, may not be the most effective way forward. Read More

The topic of this paper is, in the words of one reviewer, 'one of the most discussed sociological and societal issues in African studies: the relationship between traditional institutions and new institutions'. Often in such discussions, the 'traditional' and 'modern' are framed as if in opposition to one another, and debate centers on whether and to what extent tradition should cede to modernity, or modernity should yield to the dictates of traditional norms. Read More

Services are more efficient and equitable when targeted to the different needs of men and women. A gender assessment, focused on a specific issue or sector, is a cost effective tool for improving project performance and meeting poor people’s needs. Read More

Alternative dispute resolution encompasses arbitration, mediation, conciliation, and other methods-short of formal litigation-for resolving disputes. Alternative dispute resolution offers several advantages over a lawsuit. It is less adversarial and in some cases can be faster and less expensive. It can also reduce court workloads. For these reasons its use is being promoted by court reformers in many developing and transition economies. Read More

Following the European model, many developing, and transitional economies have established councils, independent of other government branches to govern their judiciaries. Spain's experience illustrates the issues raised by the creation, and operation of these entities. It's Constitution states that the Council is to consist of the president of the Supreme Court who presides over it, plus twenty individuals, each of whom serves for five years. Read More

The note reviews England's experience on the potential of small claims procedures in expanding access to justice, which allow legal redress in situations where formal litigation would be too costly. But, while these procedures offer access to justice, they also illustrate the difficulties that informal dispute resolution mechanisms can pose. Read More

For almost 50 years judges, lawyers, and policymakers in the United States have experimented with ways to speed up the processing of civil and criminal cases. Several lessons have emerged from this effort: a) Delays cannot be legislated away. b) Commitment is essential. c) Incentives must be addressed. d) Solid empirical analysis is crucial. e) Successful programs may not reduce delays. Read More