Judges are the best social workers
I used to think of poverty policy in the usual way: wages, transfers, growth, maybe education. Then I started to reflect on how justice actually works in many Latin American countries, and the picture changed. Not because the justice system is the only thing that matters, but because it shapes almost everything else.
Start with a simple observation. In many places, laws exist but are not enforced. Contracts are shaky, labour rights are theoretical, property is insecure, and crimes often go unpunished or punished too late to matter. In that environment, effort does not reliably pay, and people resort to connections and bribes. That’s not just unfair; it’s economically destructive.
If you fix the justice system, you change the rules of the game. When people believe that courts will actually do their job, incentives shift. Individuals invest more, small businesses take risks and long-term planning starts to make sense. You don’t need to tell people how to escape poverty; you need to stop punishing them for trying.
Labour markets are a good example. On paper, many Latin American countries have decent labour laws. In practice, enforcing them can take years, require lawyers or simply go nowhere. Workers know this, so they accept bad deals. Employers know it too, so the worst ones push boundaries while the better ones get undercut.
Now imagine a different setup. Workers are confident that if they are cheated, they will get justice in a reasonable time. Employers know that non-compliance has real costs. Suddenly, exploitation is no longer a competitive advantage. Bad employers start to disappear, not because the state micromanages wages, but because the rules finally bite. That alone is a powerful anti-poverty mechanism.
Crime fits into the same logic. In many cities, the problem is not that the police never catch criminals. It is that offenders are arrested and then released because courts are overwhelmed, slow or dysfunctional. Punishment becomes unlikely, and delay destroys deterrence, with the consequence that the young people on the margin start too see crime as a rational choice. But if offences are processed quickly and predictably, legal work becomes the better option. Communities become safer, trust increases, and everyday economic life becomes easier. That feeds directly back into employment and opportunity.
There is also a deeper point about equality. A functioning justice system compresses the value of connections and bribes. When outcomes depend less on who you know and more on evidence and procedure, competence starts to dominate. Small firms can compete, talented people without social capital can move up, the economy shifts away from rent-seeking and towards actual value creation. That matters more for social mobility than many redistributive policies.
So why does this fail so badly in practice? Part of the answer is bureaucracy. Many judicial systems still operate like colonial relics: paper everywhere, extreme formalism, endless procedures and professional cultures that resist change. Delay and opacity are not accidental side effects. They create space for discretion, and discretion creates rents. The poor pay the price in time, money, and resignation.
This is where technology becomes a useful lever. Not to replace judges, but to strip out friction. There is no good reason why most cases still rely on paper. Full digitisation, mandatory timestamps and transparent case tracking would already transform accountability. Low-complexity, high-volume cases like labour disputes or small claims can be fast-tracked without compromising judgment quality.
You could even go further. Public, immutable ledgers, using blockchain-style systems, could record filings, procedural steps and rulings. The value here is not ideological novelty but transparency and auditability.
For very poor people, justice often fails before it begins, because access matters just as much as efficiency. Justice is often too slow and intimidating. If filing a basic claim requires lawyers, travel, and days off work, most people will rationally give up. Simplified processes and app-based access can change that. Filing a case, tracking its progress, and receiving updates in real time can turn justice from a distant abstraction into a usable service.
A stronger, simpler, more accessible justice system improves labour markets, reduces crime through certainty rather than brutality, weakens populism by making institutions actually work and restores the basic idea that playing by the rules is worth it. That is why the justice system should be seen not just as a legal concern, but as one of the most powerful anti-poverty policies a society can pursue.