From Justice Data Observatory:
Around the world, civil justice problems are ubiquitous. These issues affect core areas of life, including the ability to make a dignified living, to have a safe and healthy place to live, and to care for dependents. Over the past two decades, a research literature has developed that offers a new lens on civil justice issues and their impacts. This work centers the justice experiences of ordinary people, rather than the structure or staffing of justice institutions, the elements of legal families, or the content of laws themselves. This growing body of empirical research supports a shift in policy and practice toward justice that is people-centered.
This project seeks to uncover two aspects of research on people-centered justice: what research questions regarded as important have been explored and what have not; and, the kinds of contexts for which research and data do and do not exist. We investigate the existence of such empirical research literature for different types of country contexts, with various levels of income, civil justice function, and social inclusion of marginalized groups. We chart the kinds of contexts in which researchers have conducted empirical research into questions of people-centered access to justice and the kinds of questions that research has explored, identifying both what kinds of knowledge have been produced for what kinds of contexts, and what kinds of questions and contexts remain as yet unexplored or underexplored.