Hope is a legal outcome

Every justice system keeps a ledger. Courts publish how many cases came in, how many went out and how long the queue between the two has grown. Legal aid schemes count matters opened and matters closed. Law firms count hours, and matters won. When we argue about whether the law is working, these are the columns we read.

They are useful columns. They are also, I have come to think, the wrong bottom line.

For my doctoral research at Stellenbosch University, I surveyed 2,306 South African adults about their experience of the law. Most of the questions were the familiar ones. Had they had a problem a lawyer could have helped with? (55% had, which sits right on the worldwide median.) Did they try to solve it? Was it resolved? But I also asked something no justice ledger I know of records: how do you feel about the future?

Just 29% said hopeful. Another 37% said anxious, and 28% were unsure.

Then I looked at what travelled with hope, and the strongest signals were about the law.

People who believed South Africa's laws are respected were 3.4 times more likely to describe themselves as hopeful. People with very positive feelings about the Constitution were 2.8 times more likely. Those who believed the law could be used to make the future better were 2.3 times more likely. And those whose legal problem had been resolved were 1.8 times more likely.

Read that order again. The one thing our ledgers are built to measure, whether a problem was resolved, comes last. The three above it are not the outcome of any single case. They are beliefs about the system as a whole: that the rules hold, that the founding document means something, that law is something you can pick up and use rather than something that happens to you.

I want to be careful here, because this is exactly the kind of finding that gets overstated. These are correlations from one online survey, in English, in one country. They do not show that respect for the law produces hope. It is just as plausible that hopeful people are more generous about their institutions. But even the cautious reading should unsettle anyone who runs, funds or regulates a legal system. If what people carry away from the law is, above all, a sense of what their future can hold, then a ledger that only counts closed files is recording the by-product and missing the product.

Now look at the other side of the books.

Only 8% of respondents believed South Africa's laws are respected, against 68% who said they are not. Of the people who had a legal problem and looked for help, 29% saw it fully resolved, 32% saw no resolution at all and 22% were still waiting. More than half (57%) did not know how laws are made.

On those numbers, the system is running a deficit. And yet 70% of respondents said they believed the law could help improve their future. Only 10% said it could not.

That is the figure I keep coming back to. In ledger terms, people are extending the law credit it has not yet earned. They are lending it their expectations on the strength of a promise, the one a constitution makes about the kind of country it is meant to build. Credit like that is the most valuable asset a legal system holds, and it never appears on a balance sheet. It does not last forever, either. Every unresolved matter, every rule seen to bend for the powerful, every person who leaves a process more confused than they arrived, draws it down a little. South Africa's founding visions of the 1990s were, among other things, an enormous line of credit. Nearly three decades on, a good deal of it has been spent.

The data also showed who extends that credit and who gets to draw on it. Legal agency followed privilege: respondents who earned more, were older, were White or had a degree were more likely to see their problems resolved. Young people in Black communities were less likely even to recognise a problem as a legal one. Yet Black respondents were 1.9 times more likely to say they felt hopeful, and those under 30 were 1.5 times more likely. The people most willing to believe in what the law could do for them are often the people it currently serves least well. That is not a comfortable sentence for anyone who works in the law.

So what would it mean to put hope on the ledger?

Not a new metric for its own sake. It would mean asking, at the end of a matter, not only 'was this resolved?' but 'do you leave with a clearer sense of what you can do next?' It would mean treating public understanding of how law is made as core infrastructure, not an outreach programme run when budgets allow. And it would mean judging legal services, including the new models now being built with technology, by whether people come away more able to plan, build and act, not only by how cheaply a file is closed.

My thesis ended on the idea that the law is not only a tool to shape the future; it could also be a tool to heal the present. I would put it more plainly now. A working legal system produces many things: judgments, settlements, contracts, compliance. But what people take home is a belief about tomorrow. We should start counting it.