Good Justice is Built by Design (and why anyone who cares about stability should want to get cracking )

Sam Muller

Most justice systems in the world were designed for a society that no longer exists. They were built for paper files, physical courtrooms, formal procedures, and slow administrative rhythms. They assumed disputes were exceptional, that people had time and money to navigate institutions, and that the state would be the primary gateway to justice. That world is gone. Today, justice problems are constant, not episodic. They arise at work, online, in families, in housing, in supply chains, and across borders. They escalate quickly. And they affect people who neither understand nor trust formal systems enough to use them. All this is happening in a world that is constantly changing fast: polarization, mood shifts, economic turmoil, wars and geopolitical tensions, and digital revolutions. Yet justice still operates as if society were slower, smaller, and more patient.

The paradox at the heart of justice reform

The paradox is not that justice systems are failing. It is that they are functioning, but no longer fit for purpose, and not changing. They produce laws, judgments, and procedures. But they quietly fail to deliver justice at the scale, speed, and accessibility modern societies require. The result is not collapse. It is irrelevance. People resolve disputes elsewhere - with employers, platforms, family members, religious leaders, or not at all. Businesses absorb losses rather than enforce contracts. Conflicts fester below the surface. Trust erodes. Economic opportunity is lost. Institutions remain standing, but legitimacy thins.

Why “more of the same” keeps failing

When justice systems struggle, the response is predictable: more judges, more lawyers, more courts, more procedures, new laws. These measures do not change the system. Justice reform gets stuck because it – as a system – it focuses on institutions, not on outcomes in people’s lives. It assumes that if institutions work harder, justice will follow. In his latest book, The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies shares import wisdom about this. He calls it the POSIWID rule: “The purpose of a system is what it does”. In other words: what justice systems now do is what they are designed for. Not necessarily by some deliberate, evil intention – but as a matter of fact. The lesson: good justice produced by design. Not more of the same. Not fiddling in the margins. But deliberate design and deployment. There is too little deliberate design. There is too little deployment of that too little design. And, the current design is not of sufficient quality. It ignores much of what we have learned over the past decades from psychology, sociology, and behavioural science: how people make decisions under stress, how conflict escalates, how trust is built or lost, how systems exclude without intending to. It does not apply the best practice about solving public problems. We keep upgrading procedures, while leaving the operating system untouched.

It is time for Justice 2.0.

This justice does not start with courts or ministries. It starts with two simple questions: What do people and businesses actually need when they face a justice problem and what helps them move forward? And how do we design and deploy what people need, together with those who need it? This is not about dismantling courts or abandoning the rule of law. Quite the opposite. Not having the current systems is a lot worse than having them. The challenge is to transform the system while it is still functioning. Justice systems are deeply intertwined with power, history, and authority. That is why reform is slow - and why it cannot be delegated to pilots, technology, or well-meaning tweaks at the edges. Real change requires, firstly, a shared, people centered vision of what justice is for, with leadership willing to confront institutional comfort zones. Secondly, building ecosystems that allow innovation without fragmentation. Thirdly, data that shows what actually works for people. The real question is no longer whether justice must change. It is whether we are willing to change it before irrelevance hardens into instability. This is a moment for a deliberate reset, grounded in how people actually live. To rethink justice as public infrastructure that supports a good life, now and into the future. It can be done. We know.

How many politicians and political parties are willing to make this a key election promise?

At Justice Compass Advisers, we work alongside court leaders and justice institutions to facilitate co-design procesorganizational capacity, generate data, and build the measurement systems that move people-centered people-centered and open justice innovation from rhetoric to reality.