by Georgie Rychner, Senior Researcher, Legal Services Research Centre

There is growing international momentum behind the idea of a justice system grounded the experiences and perspectives of the people it is designed to serve.  

A new report I wrote with research colleagues at the Victoria Law Foundation takes the next step, exploring how people-centred justice is being put into practice in Victoria, and how well those efforts appear to be working. 

Why people-centred? 

Since 2016, many nations have seen a decline in the rule of law that a recent OECD report attributes, in part, to a decrease in access to justice. In OECD member nations, an estimated 600 million people cannot resolve their justice problems. To combat this, the report argues, a more responsive rule of law is needed, one that is fair, accessible and timely. One way to this is through designing and implementing justice solutions that are more people-centred. 

People-centred justice aims to ‘put people and their legal and justice needs at the centre of the justice system’. This means understanding formal justice systems from the perspective of the people they intend to serve, and designing justice policies, mechanisms and services with the person and their legal needs in mind. Increasingly, international organisations such as the OECD, World Justice Project and Hague Institute for Innovation of Law assess justice efforts through this lens. 

How do we know what ‘people-centred’ looks like?

While the ‘people-centred justice’ movement has recently gained traction (acknowledging that this has really been a movement at least two decades in the making), considerable work is still needed to close the justice ‘gap’ – the disparity between the legal help that people need and the help they receive. 

Across the world, legal needs surveys have been crucial in aiding our understanding of the severity of the justice gap, and how people navigate to, and through, legal help. In Australia, from the Public Understanding of Law Survey we know that 57% of problems had unmet legal need even after being brought to legal services. The Pilot Victorian Legal Understanding and Lawyer Use Survey confirmed that 39% of respondents who obtained independent help failed to get the level of help they needed.  

How do we know what works? 

Much has been written on what people-centred justice might look like, but evidence of what works to close the justice gap ‘remains thin’. The 2019 Pathfinders Justice for All report pulled examples of what was seen to be ‘working’ to enable people-centred justice across the world, including empirical evidence where available. This included, for example, helping people to understand the law, increasing participation in justice, and establishing effective grievance mechanisms. In the United States, evidence of the effectiveness, scalability and sustainability of the community justice worker model, particularly in Alaska, is emerging. 

In Victoria, colleagues at the Victoria Law Foundation and I undertook research where we invited justice sector organisations (including community legal centres, courts and ombudsmen) to share initiatives that they had seen to be working to help people meet their legal needs. The findings of the Measure for Measure final report echoed a lot of international literature in demonstrating how designing accessible and timely pathways to legal services, collaboration between legal and non-legal organisations and experts, as well as warm referrals and supported transitions between services can make a difference to help-seekers.  

Legal capability is key 

The PULS and LULU surveys provide empirical evidence of how legal capability makes a difference to how people understand and navigate help for everyday legal problems. Measure for Measure found that across the justice sector, organisations are striving to not only achieve resolution for these legal problems, but to increase help-seeker’s legal capability – spanning understanding of the law, confidence, digital capability and trust in the legal system. Many of the researched initiatives were also designed not only to address people’s legal problems, but to positively change their relationship to the law. Where multiple services were working alongside one another, there was also capability building at play through knowledge exchange: between generalist and specialist lawyers, as well as between legal and non-legal professionals (often from community services, mental health and medical fields).  

What next? 

Measure for Measure’s findings are meaningful, but the project was really a starting point to audit what we know, and what remains to be found out. Stronger evidence, deeper insight, and coordinated effort are needed to build a more rigorous and systemic picture of what works, and for whom.

Read the report: Measure for Measure: A People-Centred Approach to Tailoring Justice