XIX ISA World Congress of Sociology (July 15-21, 2018)

247

Justice for Citizens: Toward a Demand Driven Approach to Quality of Justice

RC12 Sociology of Law (host committee)

Language: French and English

Let’s start from citizens. From their point of view, the demand of justice is a demand of a service. Which kind of service? Citizens encounter problems that might have a significance from the legal point of view when they experience a situation of “locked in resources”. A conflict is not causing necessarily legal issues if the individuals do have the cognitive, the reputational, the relational, and the economic resources to settle it. In many cases our life runs through conflicts that will never reached any judicial arena. We do not ask permanently to the legal system to support us in settling our daily conflicts. This experience comes out with a high potential in worsening the conditions of living of those individuals that do have already a small amount of resources at their disposal. Poorly educated citizens or citizens suffering from serious diseases or again citizens that have already experiences judicial problems may have a reduced capacity to bear the lack of resources – first being the time and secondly the reputation – locked into the pending conflicts not solved or not yet solved.

If this way of reasoning is accepted, several consequences both analytical and practical, can be drawn. Mainly this touches the key role played by equality, not only formal – the law in the book – but also and eventually more importantly equality to access opportunities of growth.