The Guide is a joint production of the Open Society Justice Initiative (“the Justice Initiative”) and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) under synergy work on people-focused approaches to measurement of access to justice.
The form and content benefitted from inputs provided by the OECD Public Governance Directorate under the direction of Marcos Bonturi and by the Open Society Foundations’ Justice Initiative under the direction of James Goldston and Zaza Namoradze. The OECD work on Equal Access to Justice is led by Tatyana Teplova, Head of Unit, Gender and Justice for Inclusiveness, OECD Public Governance Directorate; coordinated by Chloé Lelievre, Policy Analyst and; under the guidance of Martin Forst, Head of Division, Governance Reviews and Partnerships. The document also draws on the input from Marco Mira d’Ercole, Head of Division, Household Statistics and Progress Measurement. Numerous Justice Initiative staff contributed to the development of this Guide including David Berry, Senior Communications Officer, Matthew Burnett, Policy Officer, Sumaiya Islam, Senior Program Manager, Zaza Namoradze, Director of the Justice Initiative’s Berlin Office and Robert O. Varenik, Director of Programs.
Principal authors of the Guide are Professors Pascoe Pleasence and Nigel Balmer, Co‑directors of the Centre for Empirical Legal Studies, University College London, with additional content provided by Peter Chapman, Senior Policy Officer, Justice Initiative.
Special thanks are due to the advisory stream of country and expert stakeholders who provided valuable inputs. These include:
1. Statistics South Africa (Raphael Kasonga, Solly Molayi and Isabel Schmidt)
2. Ministerio de Justicia y Derechos Humanos, Argentina (Gustavo Maurino)
3. Law and Justice Foundation of New South Wales, Australia (Geoff Mulherin)
4. Instituto Nacional de Estatística, Cabo Verde (Celso Soares)
5. Departamento Nacional de Planeación, Colombia (Eduardo Freire Delgado, Manuel Felipe Diaz Rangel)
6. Hague Institute for Innovation of Law (HiiL) (Martin Gramatikov)
7. Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía, Mexico (Adrian Franco Barrios)
8. United Nations Development Programme (Aparna Basnyat and Alexandra Wilde)
9. Department of Justice, United States (Allen Beck)
10. World Bank (Paul Prettitore and Bilal Siddiqi)
11. World Justice Project (Alejandro Ponce and Sarah Chamness Long)
In particular, comments and details were provided by authors and expert in the field of legal needs surveys, including Cleber Alvez, Public Defender, State of Rio de Janeiro; Ab Currie, Canadian Forum on Civil Justice; Hazel Genn, University College London; Gillian Hadfield, University of Toronto; Kuo-Chang Huang, Academia Sinica; Masayuki Murayama, Meiji University; Shruthi Naik; Alan Paterson, University of Strathclyde; Rebecca L. Sandefur, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Marijke ter Voert, Ministry of Justice, The Netherlands; and Jan Winczorek, University of Warsaw. Numerous representatives from national governmental and civil society organisations also provided valuable feedback on the approach and content of this document, including colleagues from Argentina, Colombia, Indonesia, Kenya, Mongolia, Nepal, Philippines, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Ukraine and the United Kingdom. Colleagues in Korea, Nepal and South Africa experimented with the legal needs methodology presented in the Guide.
Editorial and logistical assistance was made possible by Charlotte Dubald, Roxana Glavanov, Amelia Godber, Myron Manns, Andrea Uhrhammer, Martyna Wanat, Cicely Dupont-Nivore, Lyndon Thompson, Andrew Esson, Meral Gedik and Eleonore Morena.