Introduction

The concept of access to justice has become an integral part of policy discourse in many countries. The attractiveness of its symbolism has made it a convenient wrapper for many proposed changes in court procedures and legal services. Access to justice is intimately connected with the rise of consumer protection and it is embedded in the United Nations Guidelines for Consumer Protection, which provide:

Governments should also ‘encourage enterprises to resolve consumer disputes in a fair, expeditious and informal manner’ and ‘information on available redress and other dispute-resolving procedures should be made available to consumers’.

In this essay I discuss two topics in relation to consumer redress and access to justice. My primary topic concerns the distributive impact of individualised complaint and redress procedures. I explore the question whether individualised redress procedures have a distributional tilt against lower-income and disadvantaged groups. I approach this question through an analysis of socio-legal research on three topics: consumer responses to problems with goods and services; the role of intermediaries in consumer disputes; and research on small claims courts. I then pose some questions raised by this research for thinking about reforms to the legal system and regulation of consumer markets.