Conference ‘Equal Access to Justice: Between Normativity and Reality’

Equal access to justice is a central prerequisite for democratic societies. Yet the gap between legal ideals and lived reality remains wide. Legal aid systems face growing pressure, digitalisation creates both new opportunities and new barriers, and social inequalities continue to shape how people understand and use the law. In times of increasing social and economic polarisation, questions of equitable access to justice become ever more pressing.

The two-day conference on 26-27 March brings together German and international scholars to examine these challenges in an interdisciplinary setting. Through lectures, interactive formats, and discussions, we will address key topics such as legal aid and advice, digitalisation, legal consciousness and mobilisation, civil society actors, bureaucracy, and classical as well as emerging theoretical approaches. The conference aims to identify empirically grounded and theoretically promising directions for future research on law and access to justice in the context of social inequalities.

Our information on data protection for photos and film recordings can be found here.

The venue is wheelchair accessible. Please contact Christine Gutmann (christine.gutmann [at] wzb.eu) if you require assistance.

Please register by 20 March via this link. Please note that you can attend the keynote, the conference, or both. 

Best regards,

Michael Wrase, Alexander Graser, and Anna Löbbert

The conference will start with a evening lecture by Rebecca Sandefur on 'Access to Justice in the 21st Century' on 25 March:

Around the world, justice is inaccessible to literally billions of people. This failure is particularly poignant in democracies, ostensibly constituted by parity of participation. Conventional solutions, grounded in formal law, lawyers, and courts, offer a robust track record of failure. This did not happen by accident. It was not fated. And, it is not inevitable. We have the opportunity to make different choices that guide different actions. We can start by recognising key reasons we keep getting this wrong. One is that our approaches reflect tradition rather than empirical evidence. Justice systems reflect assumptions about how people experience legal problems that research shows are often wrong. A second reason is conceptual narrowness. Formal legal institutions routinely ignore insights from other disciplines and other contexts, limiting both effectiveness and imagination. A third reason is the tacit premise that law belongs to lawyers. This distracts us from recognising that people’s problems are human experiences worthy of both just solutions and the freedom and capacity to organise around important and frequently ignored interests. A just future requires a shift to justice that centres people rather than institutions. This includes designing solutions around people’s actual experiences; grounding policy and practice in data; seeking and respecting what we can learn from other expertise and other contexts; and treating law as a public good rather than a professional monopoly. This sounds like hard work, which it is. We can take encouragement that some of it is already happening. Like democracy, this is a collective project, engaging new and sometimes unexpected partners, working together to help law come to belong to everyone in practice, not just in theory, helping democracy move toward its fulfilment.