Date of Publication :21st July 2021

Abstract: Access to justice cannot be easily defined. It is a political, legal and rhetorical symbol undeniable power and attractiveness for the subjects of statecraft. Access to justice has an intrinsic nexus with the term justice, in the sense that it is its minimum prerequisite. The notion of justice evokes the cognition of the rule of law, of the resolution of conflicts, of institutions that make law and of those who enforce it; it expresses fairness and the implicit recognition of the principle of equality. Access to justice relates to the ease of entry to the legal institution as also to the nature of the de jure fact that carries its promise. The concept of access to justice has undergone an important transformation; earlier a right of access to judicial protection meant essentially the aggrieved individuals formal right to merely litigate or defend a claim. The reason behind this was that access to justice was a natural right and natural rights did not require affirmative state action. However, with the emergence of the concept of welfare state the right to access to justice has gained special attention and it has become right of effective access to justice. In the modern egalitarian legal system the effective access to justice is regarded as the most basic human right which not only proclaims but guarantees the legal rights of all. In today’s world “access to justice” means having recourse to an affordable, quick, satisfactory settlement of disputes. In other words it serves to focus on two basic purposes of legal system – the system by which people may vindicate their rights and / or resolve their disputes under the general auspicious of the state. Thus it requires that the system, firstly, must be equally accessible to all, and secondly, it must lead to the result that are individually and socially just. This paper thus seeks to deal with problems of access to justice from the point of view of power dynamics, by analyzing ancient legal model, present access to justice model and the model provided under the constitution.

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