Community-Based Justice and the Rule of Law in Liberia: A Field Experiment Using Mobile Paralegals

In this study we examine the accountability of justice delivery mechanisms in post-conflict Liberia and conduct a randomized controlled trial of an innovative mobile paralegal intervention run by The Carter Center.

Decades of unrest and civil war in Liberia have seen the collapse of formal legal institutions. Formal courts are expensive, hard to access, slow and non-transparent; trained legal capacity is small; and few people are legally literate. Most Liberians rely on customary institutions, which though quicker and more accessible, function independently of any notions of individual rights enshrined in Liberian statutory law. The lack of state capacity means that both formal and informal institutions operate largely unregulated and unchecked.

At this juncture, The Carter Center is piloting an innovative mobile paralegal (“Community Legal Advisor”) program that seeks to address the high social and financial costs people face when travelling outside their communities to seek justice. The mobile paralegals visit rural communities on a regular schedule, providing free-of-cost legal advice, assisting disputants in negotiating local institutions, and directly mediating disputes if so requested. CSAE is working with Carter to implement a randomized controlled trial of the intervention

We have conducted a representative household survey of 2,500 households in 176 rural communities in Liberia during 2008/09. This survey covers demographics, dispute incidence, processes and mechanisms of dispute resolution, and a wide range of characteristics of local police, magistrates, commissioners and community justice providers (chiefs, elders, secret society leaders). Half the surveyed communities have been randomly selected to receive the treatment (visits from the mobile paralegals), and the remainder have been assigned as control communities. Follow-up surveys will be conducted in both treatment and control communities after 10-12 months of exposure to measure differences in key outcomes such as the incidence, reporting, and resolution of disputes; reported satisfaction and trust in the justice system; household economic status and decisions; and the behaviour of justice providers.

The results of the study will deepen our understanding of the effectiveness of interventions designed to strengthen community-based accountability, and its implications for household wellbeing.

Parallel work on paralegals is being performed in Sierra Leone.