Maximizing the Middle of Justice Systems: Institutional Reform, Resilience, and the Future of Rule of Law
By Hadley Rose, Director of Programs
Pictured: a house similar to the one described in this story
My first job after law school was supporting victims of land rights violations in Rwanda. Our office represented a woman who had already won a court judgment proving her right to her family home over a male relative who was illegally occupying the property. The court judgment ordered that the land be returned to her. This was consistent with the law in Rwanda, which had confirmed the right of women to inherit land almost 10 years earlier. On paper, the rule of law had worked.
In practice, it hadn’t.
Months after receiving the court judgment in her favor, the woman was sleeping outside on the porch of the house that legally belonged to her. The local authorities who should have assisted with implementing court judgments were friendlier with the illegal squatter than with the rightful owner. There was no effective mechanism to enforce the court decision. The realization of women’s rights to inherit land—recognized for 10 years by law—was not yet fully entrenched in the community.
In the more than 15 years since then that I have been working in the rule of law field, I have observed this same pattern, again and again. New laws are adopted. Courts apply them to important cases. Protection for individual rights incrementally increases. Yet, the lived reality rarely meets the intended outcome. Rule of law work plugs one leak, diverting pressure to another crack that becomes a gaping hole. Court processes improve, overwhelming prosecution departments. Laws are reformed to protect women’s rights, but enforcement is inconsistent. What failed this woman was not the absence of law or justice, but the absence of a functioning pathway between the two.
“Laws don’t enforce themselves; people enforce laws; and how these laws are enforced can be a blind spot of much rule of law work.”
In much of rule of law work, the space before justice is realized has often been treated as a discrete site or moment of “enforcement.” Interventions often engage tangible outcomes like legislative reform, taking for granted questions of who carries the burden of enforcement (never mind how). In other words: laws don’t enforce themselves; people enforce laws; and how these laws are enforced can be a blind spot of much rule of law work. When a court issues a judgment or a law is adopted, enforcement is not a single step — it’s an entire ecosystem of agencies, people, authority, public trust, coordination, and professional judgment, exercised over time. Police officers determine if they have probable cause to investigate a suspect. Labor inspectors determine which site to visit and when. Civil servants accept and waive fees, fines, and paperwork to keep the community in motion.
For individuals navigating the justice system, this “enforcement” space is not abstract. It is full of specific entities and individuals representing the state, who determine whether and how a judgment is respected, whether a right is protected, and whether legal recognition translates into safety, security, or economic opportunity. When those entities are weak or under-resourced, or if the incentives are misaligned, justice becomes unpredictable and dependent on personal relationships and individual discretion rather than the rule of law. If enforcement is carried out by individual people across a network of institutions, then strengthening rule of law requires more than improving laws or expanding access to courts. It requires deliberate attention to the institutions, professional roles, individuals, and decision-making processes that connect legal authority to lived outcomes.
The space between legal authorities on paper and lived outcomes for individuals is the institutional middle of justice systems, populated primarily by civil servants who are responsible for translating law and rights into daily practice. For people navigating the justice system, the strength of this institutional middle is felt through personal interactions and individual decisions: whether a complaint is taken seriously, whether a required form is accepted or rejected, whether a strict deadline is enforced or waived, whether a case is pursued or quietly dropped. These everyday decisions determine whether rights are real or theoretical. Maximizing this space should not minimize the importance of sound courts, legislative reforms, or widespread public legal awareness — it simply recognizes that this layer already carries enormous responsibility, often without the authority, coordination, or professional support to carry out their duties effectively. Changing this means strengthening mandates, clarifying roles, aligning incentives, and supporting professional judgment so that lawful, predictable outcomes become the norm rather than the exception.
“The space between legal authorities on paper and lived outcomes for individuals is the institutional middle of justice systems, populated primarily by civil servants who are responsible for translating law and rights into daily practice.”
If justice does depend on the people and institutions that translate law into practice — then the question facing donors, practitioners, and partners is not whether to engage in rule of law work at all, but how to design and fund their efforts in ways that strengthen this institutional middle to better achieve rule of law objectives.
A current LWOB initiative in Zambia illustrates what designing for the institutional middle can look like in practice. Through a partnership with Zambia's National Prosecution Authority, LWOB is training prosecutors on emerging Sexual and Gender Based Violence (SGBV) topics, including technology-facilitated SGBV and survivor-centered approaches to justice. Simultaneously, LWOB is supporting two local civil society organizations that serve SGBV survivors to continue this work and conduct community-oriented human rights education. Data from these CSO’s community work is fed back to the NPA and law enforcement, shaping how prosecutors and police understand and respond to SGBV cases. This is one example of what strengthening the institutional middle can look like: better incentives, shared data, and clear protocols that make it easier for prosecutors and police to act on the laws already on the books. In this context, the central challenge is not the absence of law, but whether individuals trust that law enforcement and the justice system will be responsive to their complaints.
This approach is less a new program mode and more an example of thinking about institutional change and sustainable results centered around strengthening the institutional middle through existing efforts such as the strong work of local civil society. Designing for the institutional middle creates pathways for institutions to receive reliable input from the community, respond to it lawfully, and adjust practice over time. When those pathways are designed carefully and intentionally, justice systems are better able to learn, correct course, and sustain progress without the continual presence of external actors.
By focusing deliberately on a part of justice systems that is often treated as background, this approach offers a way to connect existing investments in law reform, community action, and service delivery into systems that can learn, adapt, and endure.
This perspective does not offer a single model or set of interventions, nor does it claim to resolve the many challenges facing justice systems and rule of law work today. But it does open a series of questions that cut across contexts and issue areas. How can we build feedback loops between communities and institutions without undermining authority? How can alternative dispute resolution and mediation function as connective infrastructure between courts and everyday governance? How do justice systems respond when harms evolve faster than formal law? What large-scale failures of rule of law are revealed when the institutional middle never fully takes hold? These are not discrete projects, but interrelated lines of inquiry that follow naturally from this way of seeing justice systems.
While our client in Rwanda eventually received the assistance she needed to get back into her home a few years after the judgment was issued in her favor, her story makes clear that justice is not only the passage of a law. It is not even the moment a court judgment is handed down. Justice depends on attention to what happens next, to both the institutions and the people responsible for turning legal authority into lived reality. Justice ultimately takes hold where awareness of rights is matched by trust that the system will respond — where reporting harm feels safer than remaining silent.
Hadley Rose, J.D./LL.M. is the Director of Programs at Lawyers Without Borders. A trained attorney by profession, she has more than 15 years of experience working in international rule of law programs in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.