THE GAP BETWEEN THE NEED FOR LEGAL AID AND ITS FULFILMENT: A SOCIO-LEGAL ANALYSIS OF THE “JUSTICE GAP”

Abstract

The “justice gap” is conventionally reported as a single figure expressing the distance between the volume of civil legal need and the volume of legal services supplied. This article argues that the conventional measure embeds a supply-side assumption — that need is met by lawyers — and therefore measures only the final stage of a much longer process of attrition. The study is doctrinal and socio-legal; it reports no original empirical data, and every quantitative statement is drawn from a published source and cited to it. Applying the framework of Felstiner, Abel and Sarat, the analysis treats the gap as a sequence of drop-off points: naming, blaming, claiming, disputing, and only then seeking assistance. Sandefur’s Community Needs and Services Study, conducted on a random sample of 668 adults in a mid-sized American city, found that sixty-six per cent had experienced at least one civil justice situation in the preceding eighteen months, but that assistance was sought from a third party outside the respondent’s social network in only twenty-two per cent of situations; cost was reported as a factor in seventeen per cent of cases where no such help was sought, while the more important reason was that people did not understand their situations to be legal. The article concludes that the binding constraint in most situations is legal recognition rather than price, that supply-side measures therefore systematically understate the gap, and that jurisdictions without a legal needs survey — including Uzbekistan — cannot at present know the size of their own.