And Justice for All? The individual determinants of access to justice: evidence from population-wide data
23/04/2026
Diogo Britto, INSPIRE Faculty Affiliate and CLEAN Director, has obtained funding from the Italian Science Fund (FIS) for a project which analyses the individual determinants of access to justice using population-wide data.
Justice is a fundamental institution promoting rule of law which is crucial for socioeconomic development. However, the presence of a formal judicial system does not necessarily guarantee broad and equitable access to justice. A major barrier to advancing our understanding about access to courts has been data availability. We lack large-scale administrative datasets linking court cases to detailed individual-level information on the population of potential users and on
the events driving the individual needs to use courts.
This proposal will leverage such data for entire Brazil along with state-or-art methods for causal inference to advance our understanding about access to courts.
Project 1 will investigate the causal effects of individual income on the probability that individuals file and win lawsuits – does money buy justice? This will be the first study to provide systematic, large-scale causal evidence on this question, which relates to important fairness and efficiency issues.
Project 2 will study a major reform changing litigation costs in labor justice, investigating how it affected access to justice by different groups. We have limited evidence on the impacts of these costs on who accesses the justice system, for what reasons, and with what outcome, and thus limited evidence on how litigation costs affect equal access to justice.
Project 3 will provide novel evidence about the influence of personal connections on judicial decisions. Evidence
on this issue has been extremely limited. The results will also be relevant for the design of recusal rules defining when judges should be disqualified from cases.
Project 4 will investigate how positive experience in courts affects future plaintiff’s behavior, leveraging the random assignment of judges to cases. It will provide evidence on the benefits of promoting broader access to justice.