Received: 29 November 2021 Revised: 1 November 2022 Accepted: 3 February 2023

DOI: 10.1111/lasr.12653

ARTICLE

Legitimacy and online proceedings: Procedural

justice, access to justice, and the role of income

Avital Mentovich 1 | J.J. Prescott 2 | Orna Rabinovich-Einy 1

1
University of Haifa Faculty of Law, Abstract
Haifa, Israel
Courts have long struggled to bridge the access-to-justice gap
2
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, associated with in-person hearings, which makes the recent
Michigan, USA
adoption of online legal proceedings potentially beneficial.
Correspondence Online proceedings hold promise for better access: they occur
Avital Mentovich, University of Haifa Faculty of remotely, can proceed asynchronously, and often rely solely
Law, Haifa, Israel.
on written communication. Yet these very qualities may
Email: [email protected]
also undermine some of the well-established elements of
Funding information procedural-justice perceptions, a primary predictor of how peo-
Israel Science Foundation, Grant/Award Number: ple view the legal system’s legitimacy. This paper examines the
492/17 implications of shifting legal proceedings online for both
procedural-justice and access-to-justice perceptions. It also
investigates the relationship of both types of perceptions with
system legitimacy, as well as the relative weight these predictors
carry across litigant income levels. Drawing on online traffic
court cases, we find that perceptions of procedural justice and
access to justice are each separately associated with a litigant’s
appraisal of system legitimacy, but among lower-income
parties, access to justice is a stronger predictor, while proce-
dural justice dominates among higher-income parties. These
findings highlight the need to incorporate access-to-justice per-
ceptions into existing models of legal legitimacy.

INTRODUCTION
Limited access to justice is a well-known and significant weakness in most if not all legal systems.
Access to justice refers to individuals’ ability to approach, initiate, and navigate legal disputes in a
world in which legal proceedings are complex, lengthy, costly, and often require specialized knowl-
edge and skills (Rhode, 2004). Decades ago, a movement to improve access to justice began by focus-
ing on legal aid and increasing the availability of effective legal representation for the indigent
(Cappelletti & Garth, 1978). Later, this movement expanded its focus to additional barriers relating

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and
distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations
are made.
© 2023 The Authors. Law & Society Review published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Law and Society Association.

Law Soc Rev. 2023;57:189–213. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/lasr 189

 15405893, 2023, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lasr.12653 by National Health And Medical Research Council, Wiley Online Library on [06/10/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
190 LEGITIMACY AND ONLINE PROCEEDINGS

to non-monetary costs, including language and framing, the complexity of proceedings, and psycho-
logical burdens, all of which work to prevent people from pursuing or defending their rights in court
(Albiston & Sandefur, 2013; Blasi, 2009; Cappelletti, 1993; Galanter, 2010; Rhode, 2014). Despite
growing awareness of the access-to-justice gap and the diverse means deployed to date to address it,
the problem persists, suggesting a need for new diagnoses, reforms, and resources.
In this vein, the arrival of advanced digital communications technology has succeeded in shifting
the access-to-justice debate in a new direction. The recent introduction of online technology into
legal proceedings underscores its potential to reduce the physical, economic, and psychological costs
of going to court (Bulinski & Prescott, 2016; Cabral et al., 2012; Rabinovich-Einy & Katsh, 2017;
Schmitz, 2019; Schmitz, 2020; Sela, 2016; Thompson, 2015), a development buoyed by COVID-19
(Bannon & Keith, 2021; Sourdin et al., 2020; Thornburg, 2020). Given the pandemic era’s embrace
of video calls, many may assume that typical online proceedings are real-time video hearings, but
asynchronous, text-based procedures are ubiquitous and long precede COVID-19. These proceed-
ings aim in significant part at overcoming stubbornly resistant barriers to the fair resolution of dis-
putes. The structured process guides parties through a sequence of questions designed to collect the
information necessary for accurate judicial decision-making, much like in-person hearings.
By offering online proceedings, courts can spare parties the need to attend court sessions physi-
cally, and when the resolution process proceeds asynchronously and in writing, parties can engage
with it at their own pace and at a time and place of their choosing. This latter option eliminates the
need to take time off work, travel to a courthouse, and arrange for childcare. It also helps parties feel
more comfortable and confident by allowing them to communicate from a familiar environment, in
writing, as opposed to relying on real-time verbal interaction at a courthouse before a judge
(Bulinski & Prescott, 2016; Mentovich, Prescott, & Rabinovich-Einy, 2020; Schmitz, 2019). Further-
more, the communication guardrails, easy-to-use online tools, and tailored information that are typi-
cally available in asynchronous online court processes can help parties frame their arguments and
make their case effectively without relying on legal representation or knowledge of how the law or
the legal system work (Bulinski & Prescott, 2021; Prescott, 2023; Sela, 2016; Susskind, 2019).
At the same time, the very features that create opportunities for better access, in particular the
remote and asynchronous nature of online communication, may detract from how parties perceive
the quality of their interpersonal treatment by the court (and the system) during online proceedings
(Mentovich, Prescott, & Rabinovich-Einy, 2020). The opportunity for rich, real-time communication
among parties and the judge, which includes ongoing dialogue, body language, and tone of voice, is
supplanted by thin, one-directional written communication (Sternlight, 2020). The consequence
may be an impoverished experience of procedural justice in online proceedings, which may, in turn,
come at a cost to the system’s perceived legitimacy.
In the current study, we are the first to explore the antecedents of system legitimacy in the novel
arena of online court proceedings. We begin with a traditional legitimacy model (e.g., Lind &
Tyler, 1988), which centers on procedural-justice perceptions. We then supplement the model with a
novel consideration: party perceptions of access to justice, which we base on the unique characteris-
tics of online proceedings and the primary motivation for their adoption (e.g., easy remote access).
In our analysis, we find that access-to-justice perceptions are strongly associated with a litigant’s
views of the system’s legitimacy. Procedural-justice concerns also remain an important predicate of
legitimacy in online proceedings, but access-to-justice concerns have a larger predictive relationship
with legitimacy among lower-income litigants relative to their higher-income counterparts.
We explore the antecedents to legitimacy in legal proceedings using real-world online traffic dis-
putes. While traffic cases are not representative of all legal disputes, they are attractive for this
research for several reasons. First, traffic cases constitute the large majority of online proceedings
today, and online traffic cases typically use what appears to be the preferred format of written, asyn-
chronous communication (as opposed to real-time video interaction; see Mentovich, Prescott, &
Rabinovich-Einy, 2020; Rabinovich-Einy, 2021; Sela, 2021). Second, traffic cases make up a majority
of all legal cases in the United States, and they are the archetypal scenario in which individuals
 15405893, 2023, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lasr.12653 by National Health And Medical Research Council, Wiley Online Library on [06/10/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
MENTOVICH ET AL. 191

resolve a legal dispute in court (Johnson, 2004). Finally, traffic cases embody a more general category
of legal cases in which individuals confront government officials (e.g., tax appeals, administrative
proceedings) in what is supposed to be a government-provided, neutral forum. Consequently, we
believe studying online traffic proceedings can afford important insight into the consequences of the
shift online for court legitimacy.
In the following section, we provide an overview of the standard legitimacy model in the tradi-
tional court setting, discussing the role of normative (procedural-justice) and instrumental (out-
come-favorability) concerns in predicting legitimacy. We then summarize the few studies that
empirically examine procedural justice and access to justice in online settings, none of which explore
legitimacy. Next, we suggest that access-to-justice perceptions may serve as an additional antecedent
to legitimacy and propose that the relationship of such perceptions to legitimacy may depend on a
litigant’s socioeconomic status. We follow with an examination of our revised model of legitimacy
using survey data from online court users in real traffic cases. We conclude with a discussion of our
findings and their implications for the emerging phenomenon of governments choosing to dispense
justice online.

PROCEDURAL JUSTICE AND LEGITIMACY IN THE TRADITIONAL FACE-

TO-FACE SETTING

Legitimacy is a fundamental attribute of legal institutions. It implies that legal authorities are worthy
of their institutional role and therefore individuals in society should follow their direction
(Fagan, 2008; Tyler, 2003; Tyler & Jackson, 2014). Absent legitimacy, legal authorities endure resis-
tance from the public and must base compliance on costly, and often ineffective, enforcement mea-
sures, such as penalties designed to deter (Bottoms & Tankebe, 2012; Mentovich, Prescott, &
Rabinovich-Einy, 2020; Nagel, 1987). When legal institutions enjoy high levels of legitimacy, people
obey laws because compliance seems like the right thing to do, not out of fear of legal sanctions
(Jackson et al., 2012; Meares, 2002). Since legitimacy represents the internalization of the institu-
tional role of legal authorities, many characterize legitimacy as a cornerstone of the rule of law in
democratic societies (Rosenfeld, 2001; Tyler, 2003).
Ample scholarship attempts to explore and understand legitimacy’s antecedents. Initially,
researchers conjectured that legitimacy is likely grounded in instrumental concerns, like outcome
favorability or experiencing a better distribution of resources (Kelley & Thibaut, 1978; Komorita
et al., 1993; MacCoun et al., 1988; Williamson, 1993). According to this perspective, people assign legit-
imacy to an institution that maximizes their desired outcomes. An alternative perspective soon
emerged, however, that shifted the focus to other normative bases (Tyler et al., 1996). This perspective
posited that people assign legitimacy to institutions when their operation aligns with the principles of
what scholars term “procedural justice.” This hypothesis spurred a large body of theoretical and empir-
ical research and gave rise to a new model that emphasizes the centrality of party perceptions of
procedural-justice characteristics for understanding legal behavior and beliefs (Lind & Tyler, 1988).
The procedural-justice model emphasizes the administration of proceedings rather than their
outcome. The term “procedural justice” encompasses three interrelated elements. First, the quality
of interpersonal treatment captures how parties perceive that they are treated by legal authorities
during legal proceedings. In a courtroom context, this element focuses on whether parties perceive
their treatment as respectful and cognizant of their dignity (Tyler, 1989; Tyler & Blader, 2003).
Second, the quality of the procedure relates to parties’ perceptions of the fairness of the decision-
making mechanism. In courts, this idea translates into whether parties perceive the adjudication
process as neutral, principled, and consistently applied (Hollander-Blumoff, 2011). Last, the signif-
icance of voice and participation entails whether parties perceive the process as one that offers
them an opportunity to tell their story and whether they feel heard by decision makers (Tyler, 2007;
Welsh, 2017).
 15405893, 2023, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lasr.12653 by National Health And Medical Research Council, Wiley Online Library on [06/10/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
192 LEGITIMACY AND ONLINE PROCEEDINGS

These three components of procedural justice are interrelated and overlapping, and together they
form general perceptions of procedural justice. Nonetheless, research implies the predominance of
the first component, quality of interpersonal treatment, relative to features of the decision-making
procedure, including the opportunity to be heard (Blader & Tyler, 2003). People appear to care more
about courts treating them respectfully than about whether the process is neutral. This possibility is
particularly noteworthy for how parties experience online legal proceedings, as elements of interper-
sonal treatment, usually understood to be synonymous with in-person interaction, may be difficult
to establish in an online, asynchronous process. Still, elements that are less prominent in face-to-face
interaction may become more salient online, and people may also construe the basic idea of fairness
differently online, reorienting toward quality of platform design and user interface (Sela, 2019) or
ease of use (Hou et al., 2017). According to the fairness heuristic model (Lind et al., 1993), people
draw on the quality of treatment they receive from legal institutions to make inferences about the
fairness of outcomes they obtain from such institutions. To make inferences about fairness in online
settings, parties to a proceeding may rely more heavily on other features of the legal process as
opposed to the quality of interpersonal interaction.
Citizen encounters with police inspired the initial development of the procedural-justice model
(Hinds & Murphy, 2007; Nagin & Telep, 2017; Reisig & Lloyd, 2009; Sunshine & Tyler, 2003), but
scholars subsequently generalized the framework to evaluate legal institutions more broadly
(Hollander-Blumoff & Tyler, 2011; Tyler, 2007). Research shows that procedural-justice perceptions
predict reported satisfaction with legal proceedings and their outcomes. Most significantly, measures of
procedural justice predict perceived legitimacy of the legal system as a whole, and legitimacy, in turn,
shapes people’s future compliance with the law (Tyler, 2008). In fact, connections among procedural
justice, legitimacy, and compliance illuminate the age-old question of “why people obey the law”
(Tyler, 2006b). Unlike traditional accounts that emphasize deterrence through penalties or other incen-
tives, procedural-justice research maintains that compliance is substantially achievable through greater
legitimacy. Moreover, with respect to legitimacy’s determinants, procedural-justice perceptions appear
to be dominant and often the exclusive predictor relative to instrumental concerns, such as outcome
favorability (Tyler, 2006a). Ultimately, a positive procedural experience, irrespective of whether parties
receive the outcome they seek, will shape their deeper views on law and legal institutions.
Research offers several accounts for procedural justice’s effect on perceptions of legitimacy. According
to one view, comportment with procedural-justice principles is more reflective of the values of the group
or the institution than information about outcomes. Institutions that provide procedural justice are thus
more likely, under such a view, to perform in a reliable and fair manner (Bradford et al., 2014; Lind &
Tyler, 1988). Another explanation grounds the significance of procedural-justice information in people’s
evaluation of their own status within a group. By treating people in accordance with procedural-justice
principles, authorities signal to individuals that they are valued members, satisfying people’s intrinsic inter-
est in belonging (De Cremer, 2006; Tyler & Blader, 2003; van Prooijen et al., 2004). As an explanatory the-
ory, the procedural-justice model appears to be robust across a wide array of contexts, ranging from
courts (Tyler, 2007) and alternative-dispute-resolution processes (Creutzfeldt & Bradford, 2016;
Hollander-Blumoff & Tyler, 2011; Welsh, 2001) to police practices (Hinds & Murphy, 2007; Sunshine &
Tyler, 2003), extending even to other decision-making environments, such as workplaces (Blader &
Tyler, 2003; Greenberg & Tyler, 1987) and healthcare (Mentovich et al., 2014; Tyler, Mentovich, &
Satyavada, 2014). In each setting, research indicates the importance of procedural justice and its implica-
tions for legitimacy. At the same time, all such settings have in common some sort of face-to-face interac-
tion or encounter with a decision maker in a physical setting, like a courthouse.

EXISTING RESEARCH ON PROCEDURAL JUSTICE IN ONLINE COURTS

Few empirical studies examine user perceptions of procedural justice in online court proceedings,
and none explores the relationship of these perceptions to views about system legitimacy. Sela (2016)
 15405893, 2023, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lasr.12653 by National Health And Medical Research Council, Wiley Online Library on [06/10/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
MENTOVICH ET AL. 193

deploys a lab experiment to study online party perceptions of procedural justice when the party and
the decision maker use different modes of asynchronous online communication—that is, text-based
messages versus pre-recorded videos. Sela shows that participants report the highest level of proce-
dural justice when they communicate with decision makers in writing but receive pre-recorded video
communications from decision makers. This finding highlights the importance of procedural design
in online dispute resolution and raises concerns regarding the mode of online communication deci-
sion makers typically employ today, namely text-based messages. Sela (2016), however, does not
consider the connection between procedural-justice perceptions of online proceedings and system
legitimacy.
We know of only one study that directly investigates procedural-justice perceptions in real online
traffic court cases. Hou et al. (2017) probe actual party perceptions of online, asynchronous, written
court proceedings, analyzing the relative roles of outcome favorability, ease of use, and technological
literacy. They discover that actual outcomes and ease of use of the online process are positively asso-
ciated with procedural-justice perceptions, and that procedural justice, in turn, is associated with
fewer negative emotions (e.g., frustration, anger, etc.) toward court officials. The study also draws on
qualitative data to show that some online court users prefer synchronous communication with more
in-person cues and face-to-face interaction with a judge. Other studies, exploring non-legal contexts
(e.g., remote learning and remote health services) also show that asynchronous communication
results in lower levels of interpersonal engagement, positive affect, and cooperation than real-time
interchange (Kebede & Wang, 2022; Peterson et al., 2018).
While this research provides some insight into the possibility (and challenges) of experiencing
procedural justice in online proceedings, it neglects any relationship between procedural justice and
views about legitimacy in this setting. Existing work does not speak to whether the shift to online
proceedings and related access-to-justice improvements may transform the determinants of legiti-
macy perceptions. Online processes may alter how the traditional models of procedural justice and
legitimacy (i.e., those developed in face-to-face settings) function in practice, and we postulate that
adding access-to-justice considerations to a more comprehensive model may reveal they carry new
and significant weight in predicting and understanding legitimacy perceptions in the online context.

LEGITIMACY PERCEPTIONS: ADDING ACCESS TO JUSTICE AND

SOCIOECONOMIC STATUS
How does a change in communication medium alter our understanding of the determinants of legiti-
macy? In face-to-face settings, procedural justice is a chief normative concern and often the best pre-
dictor of legitimacy perceptions. Existing research suggests that the significance of procedural justice
emanates from interpersonal elements of communication, such as the showing of respect and dignity
(Blader & Tyler, 2003). Dispute resolution that relies on asynchronous and written online
proceedings—thus obscuring body language, facial cues, and tone of voice, and eliminating real-time,
back-and-forth exchanges—might impede the same procedural-justice “experience” that is familiar
and expected from the face-to-face adjudication context. Thus, the use of online proceedings might
naturally reduce legitimacy perceptions. But parties might also respond to the new medium by effec-
tively down-weighting the role of procedural justice—in its new “impersonal” form—in arriving at
their legitimacy judgments, a possibility current models do not contemplate.
With the limited availability of interpersonal cues online, parties may focus more on the infor-
mation that happens to be readily available in online proceedings, such as the outcome of their dis-
pute. Outcomes are an instrumental concern that usually appear as either insignificant or
substantially less important in shaping legitimacy perceptions relative to normative concerns like
procedural justice (Tyler, 2008). In online proceedings, though, the prospect of obtaining a quick
resolution—with substantially less effort and personal involvement—might dovetail with parties assig-
ning more weight to outcome favorability and less weight to traditional normative concerns, like
 15405893, 2023, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lasr.12653 by National Health And Medical Research Council, Wiley Online Library on [06/10/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
194 LEGITIMACY AND ONLINE PROCEEDINGS

procedural justice, in assessing system legitimacy. Although possible, research in the informal online-
dispute-resolution (ODR) arena offers little support for this idea. For instance, outcome favorability
does not appear to affect users’ subsequent levels of engagement in online settings (Rule, 2012).
In this paper, we go further by arguing that online legal proceedings may tap an additional
source of system legitimacy, one that existing studies of legitimacy have yet to examine: perceptions
of access to justice. While online courts are a recent development, access-to-justice reformers are
very familiar with the many hurdles that keep people from lower socioeconomic groups from realiz-
ing their rights in courts (Cappelletti et al., 1978). What started in the “first wave” as a reform
agenda focused on increasing traditional legal aid expanded in “second” and “third waves” to a call
for a multi-pronged strategy—including procedural improvements to the formal system and the
development of informal dispute resolution (Cappelletti et al., 1978), recognizing that justice can
occur “in many rooms” (Galanter, 1981). Thus, creating an “online room” where justice can take
place seems like an obvious next step.
The literature on access to justice offers a typology of barriers that stand in the way of access,
including economic, geographic/physical, and psychological barriers (Bulinski & Prescott, 2016;
Johnson, 1978). Economic barriers include direct and indirect resource costs associated with legal
proceedings—for example, court fees plus income loss, childcare burdens, and other opportunity
costs incurred while preparing one’s case and attending hearings. Geographic barriers refer to com-
plications related to the location of courts and their physical existence and design, which are most
pronounced for individuals who reside in remote areas or who live with disabilities. Finally, psycho-
logical barriers to access derive from an individual’s lack of familiarity with legal proceedings, lan-
guage mismatch, and the fear and confusion that accompany “mysterious legal machinations”
(Johnson, 1978), especially among those from disadvantaged outgroups (Mentovich, Prescott, &
Rabinovich-Einy, 2020). Subsequent research has refined and tailored this typology to various
contexts, without distracting from the significance of these basic types of barriers (Mor, 2017;
Sandefur, 2014).
Today, access to justice is a principal goal of policymakers and a central metric for evaluating the
legal system. The prospect of expanding access undergirds advocacy for various procedural reforms
as well as technological innovations, including the adoption of ODR platforms in recent years.
Indeed, online proceedings may improve access across most key barriers by reducing out-of-pocket
costs, removing geographic and physical barriers, and possibly mitigating psychological difficulties
(Bulinski & Prescott, 2016; Schmitz, 2020). Empirical research bears out this potential. For instance,
studies suggest that online proceedings mitigate case delay on an individual and aggregate level
(Prescott, 2017), reduce the frequency of default judgments (Prescott & Sanchez, 2019), and allow
parties more temporal flexibility in resolving their legal matters (Prescott, 2017).
Even so, the implications of improving access to justice through online proceedings for the per-
ceived legitimacy of the legal system remain unknown. The access-to-justice literature’s sociolegal
outlook underscores structural barriers to justice, group power dynamics, and the development of
legal consciousness (Sandefur, 2008), and empirical work in the field typically draws on objective
indicators of the number and types of litigants in various legal disputes, the legal avenues members
of different social groups pursue, and the outcomes they obtain across different dispute types
(Albiston & Sandefur, 2013; Engler, 2010; Miller & Sarat, 1980; Niblett & Yoon, 2017). In the spirit
of calls for measuring the “effectiveness” of access-to-justice reforms, several studies explore percep-
tions of access in traditional court settings (e.g., Albiston & Sandefur, 2013). For the most part, this
research serves as a means of assessing specific policy arrangements or designing novel policy
approaches (Franklyn et al., 2017; Hernandez, 2008; Pleasence & Balmer, 2018). By contrast, we
study subjective access-to-justice perceptions in an effort to better account for the perceived legiti-
macy of online proceedings.
Perhaps more surprisingly, the procedural-justice literature, which typically does target user per-
ceptions, does not forthrightly address perceptions of access to justice. A possible explanation is that
procedural-justice research tends to center on the psychological rather than the structural elements
 15405893, 2023, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lasr.12653 by National Health And Medical Research Council, Wiley Online Library on [06/10/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
MENTOVICH ET AL. 195

of users’ experiences. Accordingly, even the scant procedural-justice literature that stresses the
importance of access to a litigant’s experience does so through the traditional procedural-justice lens
(Jones et al., 2019; Zimerman & Tyler, 2010). To a degree, this recognition of access likely reflects
the overlap that exists between the two concepts (e.g., legal representation affects both access and
voice), but there are unique elements of access to justice not captured by the procedural-justice tradi-
tion (e.g., convenience of proceedings), and these features are notably absent in the procedural-
justice literature.
By combining the structural insights of the sociolegal tradition with the psychological emphasis
on party perceptions of the procedural-justice tradition, we postulate that access-to-justice percep-
tions serve as a unique and central element in an individual’s experience of the legal system and
therefore in their legitimacy assessments. In doing so, we view access-to-justice perceptions as nei-
ther normative nor instrumental but instead as structural. The normative perspective examines expe-
riences of justice processes by drawing on an individual’s internal values, needs, and motivations.
Access-to-justice elements do not correspond with such deep-seated core motivations but instead
relate to an individual’s capabilities, knowledge, preferences, resources, and constraints (Felstiner
et al., 1980). At the same time, access-to-justice elements are not instrumental in the sense that they
are not rooted narrowly in someone’s rational self-interest. Instead, access-to-justice perceptions
stem from a looser, more inclusive interaction between characteristics of the design and structure of
legal institutions and proceedings, on one hand, and people’s capabilities, knowledge, preferences,
resources, and constraints on the other (Kauffman et al., 2021).
In part for these reasons, system-provided “access,” unlike procedural justice, almost surely
affects different groups of actual and potential court users differently. Access to justice links to core
social structures (Sandefur, 2014), and commentators critique lack of access as perpetuating existing
social inequities because the same people who cannot realize their legal rights also belong to the eco-
nomically disadvantaged echelons of society (Sandefur, 2008). Efforts to increase access therefore
typically concentrate on individuals who come from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds
(Cappelletti & Garth, 1978). Indeed, early access-to-justice initiatives sought to increase legal aid for
the poor and reduce court fees and other costs (Rhode, 2004), while later reforms took aim at non-
financial barriers that nonetheless disproportionally burden marginalized populations (Colman &
Hirsch, 2014; Mor, 2017).
The practical significance of access to justice for those facing barriers implies that access-to-
justice perceptions may matter more in shaping legitimacy perceptions among people from lower
socioeconomic groups. Existing research on legitimacy, which relies on procedural-justice percep-
tions as legitimacy’s major antecedent, finds that such perceptions tend to be universal. Conse-
quently, scholars use socioeconomic data (together with other demographic variables, such as gender
and race) only to eliminate any confounding associations with procedural-justice measures, with no
theory for why one’s income, for example, would alter how procedural-justice perceptions influence
assessments of system legitimacy (Factor et al., 2014; Tyler, 1989). By contrast, access-to-justice con-
cerns may vary considerably across the socioeconomic spectrum, and for this reason, we hypothesize
that there may be differences by income level (or other relevant measures) in the relative importance
of access to justice as a predictor of legitimacy perceptions.

RESEARCH QUESTIONS, HYPOTHESES, AND EMPIRICAL APPROACH

Our research examines both the applicability of the traditional procedural-justice model to the
novel setting of online courts and the potential role of access-to-justice perceptions in predicting
legitimacy. We provide empirical evidence on three questions: (a) What are the roles of normative
(procedural-justice) and instrumental (outcome-favorability) concerns in predicting legitimacy
online? (b) What is the empirical relationship between perceived access to justice and litigant
views of system legitimacy in online proceedings? (c) Does litigant income level change the
 15405893, 2023, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lasr.12653 by National Health And Medical Research Council, Wiley Online Library on [06/10/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
196 LEGITIMACY AND ONLINE PROCEEDINGS

respective roles of access to justice and procedural justice in accounting for the perception of legiti-
macy online, and, if so, how? More tentatively, we also explore the role of perceived legitimacy—as
well as procedural justice, access to justice, and outcome favorability—in predicting future compli-
ance with the law.
We hypothesize that existing legitimacy models will require amendment when applied in the
online context because litigants are likely to experience online and offline proceedings differently.
First, we predict that procedural-justice concerns will continue to shape legitimacy perceptions in
online proceedings as they do in face-to-face proceedings. However, given the diminution in the
richness of interaction in asynchronous written communications, the link between procedural jus-
tice and legitimacy may be weaker than in a typical courtroom context (H1). Second, we do not
anticipate that outcome favorability, as an instrumental concern, will be a useful predictor of
online court legitimacy perceptions. We ground this prediction in existing research that finds, at
best, a weak association between outcome favorability and legitimacy in traditional proceedings
(Tyler, 2006a) and no evidence of any relationship between outcome favorability and behavior in
the online context (Rule, 2012) (H2). Third, given the access-to-justice motivations that drive the
design and adoption of online proceedings, we expect access-to-justice perceptions will predict
legitimacy perceptions online (H3). We also hypothesize that access-to-justice perceptions will
predict legitimacy perceptions more strongly among people with lower incomes (H4) but that
procedural-justice concerns will appear to matter equally across income levels (H5). Finally, we
conjecture that legitimacy perceptions, as shaped by experience with online proceedings, will relate
to future behavioral intentions with respect to compliance—that is, the more people view the legal
system as legitimate, the more likely they will report willingness to comply with the law in the
future (H6).

Methods
We draw our online sample from the Matterhorn platform, which handles online court proceedings
in over 100 state courts in the United States. The data come from five courthouses that make up two
district courts in Michigan. Online traffic proceedings substitute for in-person proceedings in these
courts if the parties choose to participate using the online platform (Mentovich, Prescott, &
Rabinovich-Einy, 2020). The online platform requires parties to assume responsibility but allows
them to litigate the specific outcome (Bulinski & Prescott, 2021). Parties make their case in writing
and asynchronously. Specifically, after choosing from predetermined and structured options, parties
have the opportunity to make a free-form written statement. As in face-to-face hearings, parties
explain their preferred outcome and the reasons for their request (albeit without a real-time
exchange with the judge). The system conveys submissions and other information about the case to
a prosecutor for their review and possible recommendation and then routes the case to a judge for
what is typically a final determination. After considering all relevant information, the judge delivers
a decision (usually in the form of the final fine amount and charge). The system then informs the
defendant of the judge’s decision and requires that the defendant comply in order to resolve
the case.

Participants
Our sample comprises parties in online traffic proceedings between December 2019 and August
2020. We collaborated with Matterhorn’s developers to distribute a survey to litigants through its
online court software; each litigant received an email 3 days after the conclusion of their case info-
rming them of the opportunity to participate anonymously in academic research for compensation.
Participants who completed the survey received Amazon gift cards with a value of $15–30. Interested
 15405893, 2023, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lasr.12653 by National Health And Medical Research Council, Wiley Online Library on [06/10/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
MENTOVICH ET AL. 197

participants clicked an anonymous link, which directed them to the survey site. Out of 934 people
who participated in online proceedings in these jurisdictions within our sample time frame, 216 com-
pleted the survey, a response rate of 23%, which is comparable to and even higher than the rate of
similar studies (e.g., Creutzfeldt & Bradford, 2016; Hou et al., 2017). The sample age ranges from
16 to 86 (M = 36.02, SD = 14.81). Of the sample, 127 are men and 89 are women. In Table 1, we
present the final sample’s demographics, including descriptive statistics across income groups (lower
versus higher). We note that, though the COVID-19 pandemic began during our sample period, it
did not disrupt the operation of these online proceedings, and furthermore, did not have a discern-
able effect on our findings (see Tables A5 and A6).

TABLE 1 Sample self-reported descriptive statistics.

Dimension Category Overall Lower-income Higher-income

Count 216 121 95

Gender Male 127 (59%) 65 (54%) 62 (65%)
Female 89 (41%) 56 (46%) 33 (35%)
Age 16–19 21 (10%) 20 (17%) 1 (1%)
20–29 70 (32%) 54 (45%) 16 (17%)
30–39 47 (22%) 24 (20%) 23 (24%)
40–49 36 (17%) 9 (7%) 27 (28%)
50–59 25 (12%) 9 (7%) 16 (17%)
60+ 17 (8%) 5 (4%) 12 (13%)
Race/ethnicity White 123 (57%) 58 (48%) 65 (68%)
Black 45 (21%) 28 (23%) 17 (18%)
Hispanic 8 (4%) 6 (5%) 2 (2%)
Asian 25 (12%) 19 (16%) 6 (6%)
Other 15 (7%) 10 (8%) 5 (5%)
Income Below $20,000 62 (29%) 62 (51%) 0 (0%)
$20,000–29,999 29 (13%) 29 (24%) 0 (0%)
$30,000–39,999 30 (14%) 30 (25%) 0 (0%)
$40,000–49,999 19 (9%) 0 (0%) 19 (20%)
$50,000–59,999 14 (6%) 0 (0%) 14 (15%)
$60,000–69,999 12 (6%) 0 (0%) 12 (13%)
$70,000–79,999 11 (5%) 0 (0%) 11 (12%)
$80,000–89,999 12 (6%) 0 (0%) 12 (13%)
$90,000 and above 27 (13%) 0 (0%) 27 (28%)
Education Less than high school 12 (6%) 11 (9%) 1 (1%)
High school/GED 38 (18%) 31 (26%) 7 (7%)
Some college 59 (27%) 36 (30%) 23 (24%)
2-year college degree 18 (8%) 7 (6%) 11 (12%)
4-year college degree 57 (26%) 29 (24%) 28 (29%)
Master’s degree 21 (10%) 5 (4%) 16 (17%)
Doctoral degree 5 (2%) 2 (2%) 3 (3%)
Professional degree 6 (3%) 0 (0%) 6 (6%)
Note: Percentages in parentheses are column percentages of the total sample or respective income sub-sample.
 15405893, 2023, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lasr.12653 by National Health And Medical Research Council, Wiley Online Library on [06/10/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
198 LEGITIMACY AND ONLINE PROCEEDINGS

Materials

In the survey, we ask all participants questions about their experience with the online court proceeding
they recently completed as well as about their perceptions of the legal system more generally. Respon-
dents answer several questions using a five-point scale; we then create a measurement of each construct
by taking a simple mean of each respondent’s answers to all questions that relate to that construct. We
follow this procedure to create construct measurements for perceptions of procedural justice, access to
justice, outcome favorability, legitimacy, and compliance. Table 2 displays the survey questions we use
to create each construct, and we explain the reasoning behind our approach to each variable below.

Independent variables
Procedural justice: We ask respondents about their treatment by the court during their online pro-
ceeding, exploring topics like dignity, respect, equal treatment, and the opportunity to be heard.

TABLE 2 Construct measurement.

Answer
Construct Factor Survey question scheme

Legitimacy L1 People should support the decisions made by courts even when they disagree with A
such decisions.
L2 People should do what judges tell them even if they do not like how the judges A
treated them.
L3 The courts protect the interests of ordinary people. A
L4 When judges make decisions they generally follow the law. A
L5 Judges stand up for the values that are important to me. A
L6 Judges generally have the same sense of right and wrong as the people in my A
community.
Procedural PJ1 The court treated me with dignity. A
justice PJ2 The court respected my legal rights. A
PJ3 I was treated by the court in the same way as other people in similar situations. A
PJ4 My treatment by the court was not influenced by my race, sex, age, nationality or A
some other characteristics of me as a person.
PJ5 I had an opportunity to present my case. A
PJ6 The court considered my side of the story before making a decision. A
PJ7 I felt I was understood by the court. A
Access to ATJ1 How lengthy was the process? (Reversed) B
justice ATJ2 How costly in terms of money, time, and energy was the process for you? C
(Reversed)
ATJ3 How complex was the process, in your view? (Reversed) C
ATJ4 How convenient was the process? C
Outcome OF1 I got the decision I wanted. A
favorability OF2 I was satisfied with the court’s decision. A
Compliance C1 In the next 5 years, how likely are you to break traffic laws? (Reversed) D
C2 In the next 5 years, how likely are you to break traffic laws if you are certain that D
you would not get caught? (Reversed)
Note: Answer schemes: A: 1 = Disagree; 2 = Somewhat disagree; 3 = Neither agree nor disagree; 4 = Somewhat agree; 5 = Agree. B: 1 = Not
at all; 2 = A little bit; 3 = Somewhat; 4 = Lengthy; 5 = Very lengthy. C: 1 = Not at all; 2–4 unlabeled; 5 = Very much. D: 1 = Unlikely;
2 = Somewhat unlikely; 3 = Possibly; 4 = Somewhat likely; 5 = Likely.
 15405893, 2023, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lasr.12653 by National Health And Medical Research Council, Wiley Online Library on [06/10/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
MENTOVICH ET AL. 199

Following other empirical studies of procedural justice (e.g., Bradford et al., 2014; Tankebe
et al., 2016; Tyler, Fagan, & Geller, 2014; Wolfe et al., 2016), we adapt the specific components of
our procedural-justice variable and the precise language we use in our questions from important
work on perceptions of procedural justice in legal contexts by Tyler and Jackson (2014) (itself firmly
grounded in the literature—see, e.g., Hough et al., 2013a, 2013b; Jackson et al., 2011; Sunshine &
Tyler, 2003; Tyler, 2006a). Importantly, our construct covers the three well-known dimensions of
procedural justice: interpersonal treatment, quality of the process, and voice.
Outcome favorability: We focus on two dimensions of outcome favorability: whether the respon-
dent receives their desired outcome (specifically, the “decision I wanted”) and whether the respon-
dent is satisfied with the court’s decision. As with our measure of procedural justice, we rely
on related literature on perceptions of outcome favorability in legal contexts to define the relevant
components of our variable and the specific language and scales we use in our survey questions
(e.g., Tyler & Jackson, 2014).
Access to justice: We create a novel measure of access-to-justice perceptions in online proceedings
by drawing on the literature’s theoretical typology of access barriers while keeping in mind the novel
characteristics of online communication (Creutzfeldt, 2021). Specifically, we begin with economic,
geographic/physical, and psychological barriers (Bulinski & Prescott, 2016). These categories are very
likely to span a litigant’s primary access concerns. Then we adapt how we describe these issues in the
survey so that they make sense in a context in which court users are unrepresented and communi-
cate asynchronously from some remote location through an online process that aims to translate
complex rules and “legalese” into structured processes in everyday language (Salter, 2017;
Susskind, 2019). Consequently, our measure of perceptions of access to justice includes the following
dimensions:
(a) Costs (direct and indirect)—Money is often necessary to reduce other barriers to justice—for
instance, through hiring an attorney. Costs and fees remain a significant barrier in traditional legal
proceedings, but even when a court can waive these expenses, face-to-face litigants need resources
simply to arrive at a courthouse—for example, parties face transportation costs and the opportunity
costs that come from missing work during business hours. Online proceedings eliminate or reduce
many of these costs. Accordingly, we ask respondents how costly they perceive their online proceed-
ings to be in “money, time, and energy.”
(b) Duration—Lengthy proceedings not only increase costs, but they also detract from parties’
resilience and determination in pursuing/defending their rights and could have significant “health
and emotional wellbeing” consequences (Salter, 2017). Online proceedings can eliminate the need to
communicate in real time and often the need to schedule and reschedule hearings, which comes with
the related burden of schedule uncertainty. The structured nature of ODR processes not only stream-
lines case processing but can also reduce the cognitive burden of ongoing litigation, thereby reducing
economic and psychological barriers. We therefore include a measure of parties’ perceptions of the
length of the proceedings.
(c) Complexity—People often fail to realize or protect their rights due to the difficulty and uncer-
tainty in deciphering the law and legal language, especially when unrepresented and walking into a
courthouse where in-person support from the court is minimal. Online proceedings explicitly seek
to make court processes and the law easier to navigate and understand, to reduce the need for pro-
fessional assistance, and to empower lay users to pursue redress (Susskind, 2019). To the extent that
careful design can make progress on these goals, online court processes can reduce psychological
and economic barriers. We capture this dimension of access by soliciting parties’ perceptions of the
complexity of their proceedings.
(d) Convenience—By eliminating the need to convene physically at a given time and place,
online proceedings aim to remove what commenters and scholars recognize as geographic and phys-
ical barriers to access. These barriers fall disproportionately on individuals who live in remote areas
or with disabilities. Online proceedings can also alleviate psychological concerns linked to the for-
mality of the courtroom and having to face an authority figure in person. Easy-to-use online
 15405893, 2023, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lasr.12653 by National Health And Medical Research Council, Wiley Online Library on [06/10/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
200 LEGITIMACY AND ONLINE PROCEEDINGS

proceedings that guide parties through the resolution process with straightforward language also
reduce barriers for participants with varying “legal and digital capabilities” (Creutzfeldt, 2021). We
account for these access dimensions by inquiring about the degree of convenience afforded by the
proceedings.
Income: We measure a respondent’s income using their self-reported annual income range, which
we view as a rough but easy-to-ascertain indicator of socioeconomic status. Possible responses begin
with “less than $20,000” and include each $10,000 interval above $20,000, ending with “$90,000 and
above” (nine categories). We recode these responses into lower income (income of up to just under
$40,000) and higher income ($40,000 and above). We base this income cutoff on our previous work in
a similar setting (Mentovich, Prescott, & Rabinovich-Einy, 2020). In that work, we derive the same cut-
off by assuming full-time work (2000 h per year) for double the minimum wage at the time of the sur-
vey ($10.00 per hour). Notably, many studies of human behavior in different contexts (e.g., public
health, tourism) also use the same threshold of $40,000 to distinguish between lower-income and
higher-income participants (e.g., Gordon-Larsen et al., 2003; Hearne & Niño, 2022; Kim et al., 2007).
We use this coding strategy to create two groups of roughly similar size: lower-income (N = 122,
56.2%) and higher-income (N = 95, 42.8%). We also verify the robustness of our proposed income
cutoff by examining the effects of using alternatives (see Tables A7 and A8).
Controls: Our survey also asks respondents to disclose certain demographic information, includ-
ing race/ethnicity, gender, age, and education level. We use this information to reduce any omitted
variable bias and to improve the efficiency of our estimates. In our analysis, we code race/ethnicity
as a binary variable (Black or Hispanic respondents = 1), gender as a binary variable (women = 1),
age as a continuous variable, and education level as a categorical variable with eight mutually exclu-
sive groups (base category = less than high school).

Dependent variables
Legitimacy: Our legitimacy construct taps into a respondent’s felt obligation to obey legal authorities
and, in line with recent scholarship on legitimacy (e.g., Jackson et al., 2012; Tyler & Jackson, 2014), a
respondent’s sense of normative alignment (i.e., shared values between legal authorities and the pub-
lic). Again, we borrow our specific questions and metrics from existing studies of legitimacy in the
legal context (e.g., Tyler & Jackson, 2014). Our questions inquire, in particular, about a respondent’s
beliefs about court decisions and judicial orders—specifically, whether “people” ought to adhere to
these pronouncements, even if they are wrong or if the person in question is mistreated, and whether
judges and courts support the respondent’s values and the interests of “ordinary people.”
Compliance: We base our measurement of compliance on reported behavioral intentions regarding
respondents’ future willingness to engage in law-breaking behavior in the same substantive legal
domain as the current online proceeding (i.e., the violation of traffic laws). We ask not only whether
respondents consider themselves “likely” to break the same or related laws again, but also whether
respondents are likely to break traffic laws even in a situation where there is no possibility of detection
or punishment (i.e., respondents are “certain” of their hypothetical legal immunity). Our approach dif-
fers from the strategy of other studies that pose a variety of specific traffic offense scenarios to create
their future-compliance measure (e.g., Bradford et al., 2015; Hertogh, 2015). Rather, in our exploratory
analysis of compliance, we ask participants to make a judgment about their future compliance in very
direct terms. Admittedly, our approach is explicit and simple, and therefore any results require a care-
ful and tentative interpretation.

RESULTS

To identify the antecedents of legitimacy in an online court setting, we fit OLS regressions, a method
that is appropriate for our data and hypotheses and is consistent with the approach and specifications
 15405893, 2023, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lasr.12653 by National Health And Medical Research Council, Wiley Online Library on [06/10/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
MENTOVICH ET AL. 201

in related studies that use survey data to explore the empirical determinants of legitimacy (e.g., Jackson
et al., 2012; Murphy, 2005; Sunshine & Tyler, 2003). We investigate the significance and role of three
potential predictors of legitimacy: perceptions of procedural justice, perceptions of outcome favorabil-
ity, and perceptions of access to justice. We also investigate whether and how the relative weight
accorded to each predictor changes as a function of a participant’s reported income level. We present
descriptive statistics of our outcome variables in Table 3. Participants generally report a positive experi-
ence with online proceedings. Procedural-justice perceptions, perhaps surprisingly given the remote
medium, display the highest positive evaluation level by respondents, although our descriptive mean
estimates do not differ from each other in a statistically meaningful way.
We estimate six models of legitimacy perceptions. In all models, we adjust for race, gender, age,
education level, the adjudicating courthouse, and a main effect for our reported income level vari-
able. In our first model, we investigate procedural-justice and outcome-favorability perceptions as
possible predictors of legitimacy, as these two factors stand at the center of legitimacy research in
face-to-face settings. The remaining models add additional variables of interest and interactions to
isolate the impact of adding new predictors on the estimates we obtain in earlier models—that is, to
check whether additions alter the earlier relationships we estimate. In Model 2, we add our novel
measurement of access-to-justice perceptions to the specification in Model 1. In Models 3, 4, and
5, we incorporate interactions between the income-group variable and perceptions of procedural jus-
tice, outcome favorability, and access to justice, respectively. Model 6 includes all independent vari-
ables simultaneously, including all interaction terms. We present the results of this analysis in
Table 4.
In Model 1, controlling for differences in litigant characteristics, we find that experiencing proce-
dural justice online positively predicts perceptions of legitimacy, which is consistent with what others
document in analyses of face-to-face hearings (Hollander-Blumoff & Tyler, 2011; Tyler &
Jackson, 2014). Thus, the relationship between procedural-justice and legitimacy perceptions appears
to transcend court medium. For every one-point increase in our procedural-justice construct, we
estimate a statistically significant increase in legitimacy perceptions of 0.46 on our five-point scale
(see Table 2). Also consonant with existing studies of in-person interaction with legal authorities
(Sunshine & Tyler, 2003; Tyler & Jackson, 2014), we detect no relationship between perceptions of
outcome favorability and perceptions of legitimacy in the online-court context, hinting that instru-
mental concerns may carry little weight in shaping perceptions of legitimacy both online and offline.
In Model 2, we find that our measure of access-to-justice perceptions is also a significant, positive
predictor of perceived legitimacy, even when controlling for procedural-justice and outcome-
favorability perceptions. Likewise, accounting for access-to-justice perceptions does little to alter the
relationship between procedural-justice perceptions and litigant views about legitimacy that we esti-
mate in Model 1. We note that the content and scale of our independent variables of interest make it
difficult to draw firm conclusions about the importance of access-to-justice perceptions relative to
procedural-justice perceptions because unit increments of access-to-justice and procedural-justice
scores are not necessarily comparable. Nevertheless, our evidence of a statistically significant and

TABLE 3 Descriptive statistics of model constructs.

Variable Mean Standard deviation Range

Procedural justice 4.30 0.98 1–5

Outcome favorability 4.08 1.40 1–5
Access to justice 3.90 0.81 1.75–5
Legitimacy 3.77 0.96 1–5
Compliance 4.46 0.89 1–5
Higher-income (indicator) 0.44 0.50 0–1
 15405893, 2023, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lasr.12653 by National Health And Medical Research Council, Wiley Online Library on [06/10/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
202 LEGITIMACY AND ONLINE PROCEEDINGS

TABLE 4 Perceptions of legitimacy.

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)

Procedural justice 0.456*** 0.407*** 0.334*** 0.430*** 0.376*** 0.251**

(0.099) (0.108) (0.092) (0.103) (0.110) (0.109)
Outcome favorability 0.040 0.042 0.027 0.026 0.050 0.040
(0.061) (0.063) (0.060) (0.072) (0.063) (0.080)
Access to justice 0.173** 0.185** 0.171** 0.348*** 0.420***
(0.085) (0.078) (0.083) (0.111) (0.102)
Higher-income 0.121 0.159 1.252** 0.684* 1.402** 0.264
(0.138) (0.139) (0.139) (0.367) (0.553) (0.689)
Proc. justice  higher-income 0.257** 0.393**
(0.125) (0.179)
Outcome fav.  higher-income 0.129 0.018
(0.081) (0.117)
Access  higher-income 0.396*** 0.512***
(0.141) (0.147)
Constant 1.429*** 1.062** 1.393*** 1.248*** 0.551 0.881*
(0.411) (0.414) (0.437) (0.436) (0.450) (0.450)
No. of observations 216 216 216 216 216 216
R-squared 0.345 0.361 0.375 0.369 0.385 0.411
Note: The table reports results from OLS regressions in which the outcome variable is our constructed measure of legitimacy (1 = Low;
5 = High) that a defendant ascribes to the legal system following an online traffic court proceeding. We report standard errors in parentheses,
including heteroskedasticity-robust standard errors for Columns (1), (2), (4), and (5). We control for courthouse, race/ethnicity, gender, age,
and education level in all models. The symbols *, **, and *** represent significance at the 10%, 5%, and 1% level, respectively.

nontrivial relationship between access-to-justice perceptions and perceived legitimacy points to an

important connection previously missing in scholarly work on legitimacy in legal systems.
In Model 6, we include interaction terms of our higher-income status indicator and all other var-
iables of interest, that is, procedural-justice, outcome-favorability, and access-to-justice perceptions,
respectively. By including all predictors and their higher-income interactions, and comparing the
results to Model 2’s estimates, we can test whether procedural-justice perceptions and/or access-to-
justice perceptions relate to perceptions of legitimacy differently for the lower- and higher-income
groups in our data. As we argue in Section 3, there are good reasons to hypothesize that socioeco-
nomic status may affect how strongly access-to-justice perceptions (and possibly procedural-justice
perceptions) predict perceived legitimacy.
To begin, our results indicate that the predictive relationship between procedural-justice per-
ceptions and views about system legitimacy varies with income. While our positive estimate on
procedural-justice perceptions (0.407) in Model 2 implies that, on average, a more positive
procedural-justice experience in an online proceeding may augment perceptions of the legal sys-
tem’s legitimacy, our estimate (0.251) in Model 6, describing the relationship for only our lower-
income sample of respondents, indicates a weaker relationship. By contrast, the coefficient we
estimate on our interaction between higher-income status and procedural-justice perceptions
(0.393), which denotes the marginal difference in the relationship for the higher-income group,
is positive and statistically significant. Thus, while higher procedural-justice perceptions are asso-
ciated with higher legitimacy perceptions for everyone in our sample, including lower-income
respondents, the empirical association is statistically stronger and larger for higher-income
respondents.
Our findings are starker when it comes to access-to-justice perceptions as a predictor of per-
ceived legitimacy. As with procedural-justice perceptions, Model 2 shows that access-to-justice per-
ceptions are a significant indicator of perceived legitimacy across all income groups on average,
 15405893, 2023, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lasr.12653 by National Health And Medical Research Council, Wiley Online Library on [06/10/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
MENTOVICH ET AL. 203

suggesting that, in general, the more parties experience better access through the online platform,
the more they attribute legitimacy to such proceedings. However, Model 6 reveals a drastic diver-
gence by income in how strongly access-to-justice perceptions predict legitimacy. The predictive
relationship we estimate for lower-income respondents (0.42) is larger than the average effect in
Model 2 (0.173), but the difference in the strength of the relationship for higher-income respondents
( 0.512) is even larger, negative, and highly statistically significant. These estimates imply that
higher access-to-justice perceptions positively predict perceived legitimacy only among lower-
income respondents. In fact, we find a net-negative relationship between access-to-justice percep-
tions and perceived legitimacy for higher-income respondents (by adding the access-to-justice coeffi-
cient to the interaction coefficient), though our estimate is statistically indistinguishable from zero.
To summarize, our analysis uncovers evidence of heterogeneity across socioeconomic status in
two key determinants of perceived legitimacy. First, we estimate a significant coefficient on our
procedural-justice-by-income interaction variable, which translates to procedural justice being more
weakly related to legitimacy perceptions on average for participants in the lower-income group ver-
sus the higher-income group. Second, we estimate a significant access-by-income interaction coeffi-
cient for the higher-income group that offsets the main positive access relationship, implying that
access-to-justice perceptions are a stronger predictor of legitimacy for the lower-income group. For
the sake of completeness, we add that our estimated outcome-favorability-by-income interaction
coefficient is small and statistically insignificant. Overall, these patterns are consistent with our
hypothesis that lower-income individuals place greater relative weight on access-to-justice consider-
ations in their evaluation of the legitimacy of the legal system relative to higher-income individuals.
We stress that the interpretation of our results is subtle. Because our independent variables are
ordinal in nature, it is helpful to assume that individuals from different income groups interpret
our measures in similar ways and set similar thresholds to move up or down in their responses.
Relatedly, while we interpret our results in terms of the weight that individuals put on procedural-
justice and access-to-justice perceptions in forming their views about legitimacy, individuals from
different income groups may conceive of procedural justice and access to justice differently in ways
that we do not capture in our measures. These groups may also differ in how they weight distinct
features of these concepts. We also concede that some unobservable omitted variable that is corre-
lated with reported income may be doing the work, so it is more appropriate to interpret income
as a proxy capable of distinguishing groups for which procedural-justice and access-to-justice per-
ceptions relate differently to views about legitimacy. Notwithstanding these caveats, the empirical
relationship between perceived procedural justice and legitimacy and between perceived access
and legitimacy, using our measures, is notably different for individuals from lower- versus higher-
income groups.
We turn now to an analysis of the possible underpinnings of behavioral intentions to comply
with law in the future. To that end, we estimate seven OLS regression models and a path model. The
first six regression models match our specifications in Table 4 but use intentions toward future com-
pliance as the outcome variable. In regression Model 7, we consider all of our predictors and income
interaction terms, and we add our prior outcome measure—legitimacy perceptions—as an indepen-
dent variable. Table 5 displays the results. We find no evidence of a main-effect connection between
either procedural-justice perceptions or outcome-favorability perceptions and reported compliance
intentions in any of our models. By contrast, access-to-justice perceptions correlate positively with
compliance intentions across specifications and are statistically significant in every model that
includes an access-by-income interaction term—even in our final model, which includes legitimacy
perceptions as a separate independent variable. We advise caution in interpreting these tentative
findings, but the persistent, positive relationship between access-to-justice perceptions and compli-
ance intentions in our data calls for future research to explore this possible connection.
We observe two other compliance-related patterns in our data. First, we estimate a statistically
significant coefficient on our outcome-favorability-by-income interaction coefficient (Models 4, 6,
and 7), indicating that better outcomes are associated with relatively more reported willingness to
 15405893, 2023, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lasr.12653 by National Health And Medical Research Council, Wiley Online Library on [06/10/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
204 LEGITIMACY AND ONLINE PROCEEDINGS

comply with traffic laws among those in the lower-income group. We do not detect evidence of
instrumental concerns shaping legitimacy judgments for everyone, but these tentative results raise
the possibility that outcome favorability may shape compliance intentions in a way that interacts
with income status. Second, according to Model 7 in Table 5, legitimacy perceptions may link to
reported intentions to comply with traffic laws, such that the more parties report attributing legiti-
macy to the legal system, the more they declare that they are likely to comply with traffic laws in the
future.
To explore the relationship between legitimacy and compliance intentions further, we estimate a
path model to examine any indirect links between potential predictors of legitimacy and compliance.
Legitimacy may serve as a mediator between our baseline predictors—namely, procedural-justice,
outcome-favorability, and access-to-justice perceptions, as well as their interactions with income—
and compliance. We present our findings in Figure 1. The model shows good fit indices (χ2(13)
= 31.220, CFI = 0.99, RMSEA = 0.069). The results indicate an indirect relationship between both
procedural-justice and access-to-justice perceptions—as well as their interactions with income—and
compliance intentions, with perceptions of legitimacy serving as an important conduit. (We note
that while our outcome-favorability-by-income interaction has a statistically significant relationship
with compliance in Table 5, the path model results we depict in Figure 1 report only the indirect
relationship via legitimacy, which is statistically insignificant.) This analysis comports with existing
theory and research on legitimacy in which procedural-justice judgments shape legitimacy, and legit-
imacy in turn shapes compliance (Murphy, 2005; Sunshine & Tyler, 2003).
Finally, in our Appendix A, we describe and report a number of robustness checks that explore
potential limitations to our analysis. We begin by reconsidering how we measure and control for
court outcomes, and we incorporate new data on actual outcomes (as opposed to reported outcome-

TABLE 5 Future compliance with traffic laws.

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7)

Procedural justice 0.166 0.111 0.167 0.073 0.085 0.005 0.056

(0.102) (0.106) (0.119) (0.105) (0.100) (0.134) (0.125)
Outcome favorability 0.089 0.087 0.076 0.027 0.080 0.051 0.043
(0.067) (0.068) (0.069) (0.090) (0.068) (0.100) (0.101)
Access to justice 0.195* 0.185* 0.198* 0.337*** 0.341*** 0.255**
(0.110) (0.110) (0.109) (0.108) (0.099) (0.111)
Higher-income 0.137 0.181 0.656 0.701** 1.084 1.439 1.385
(0.117) (0.118) (0.578) (0.355) (0.784) (0.877) (0.892)
Proc. justice  higher-income 0.197 0.157 0.076
(0.134) (0.179) (0.190)
Outcome fav.  higher-income 0.217** 0.267** 0.263**
(0.190) (0.112) (0.115)
Access  higher-income 0.321 0.304 0.199
(0.194) (0.196) (0.200)
Legitimacy 0.205**
(0.080)
Constant 3.939*** 3.525*** 3.272*** 3.213*** 3.112*** 2.949*** 2.769***
(0.542) (0.562) (0.639) (0.593) (0.645) (0.677) (0.677)
No. of observations 216 216 216 216 216 216 216
R-squared 0.085 0.108 0.117 0.133 0.126 0.149 0.177
Note: The table reports results from OLS regressions in which the outcome variable is our constructed measure of future legal compliance
(1 = Low; 5 = High) following an online traffic court proceeding. We report heteroskedasticity-robust standard errors in parentheses. We
control for courthouse, race/ethnicity, gender, age, and education level in all models. The symbols *, **, and *** represent significance at the
10%, 5%, and 1% level, respectively.
 15405893, 2023, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lasr.12653 by National Health And Medical Research Council, Wiley Online Library on [06/10/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
MENTOVICH ET AL. 205

F I G U R E 1 Mediating role of legitimacy in predicting future compliance (We estimate this path model using AMOS 27.
We report unstandardized coefficients with standard errors in parentheses. To maximize model fit statistics, we control for
race/ethnicity but not for courthouse, gender, age, and education level because the latter are not statistically significant.
Coefficient patterns remain the same when including all controls. The symbols ** and *** represent significance at the 5%
and 1% level, respectively. The full set of estimates is available upon request.)

favorability responses we collect from respondents). We also examine alternative measures for both
procedural-justice perceptions and access-to-justice perceptions to reduce concerns about measure-
ment error and other biases. Finally, given the importance of socioeconomic status and income to
our paper’s contributions, we scrutinize how we define and analyze income groups, testing other
plausible approaches. These exercises, plus a few others, produce results that are substantively con-
sistent with our key findings. We report most of our robustness analysis in our Appendix A Tables.

DISCUSSION

This study is the first to assess potential sources of legitimacy in online courts by examining the
applicability of the procedural-justice model to the online (traffic) court context and by exploring
the role of access-to-justice perceptions as a novel antecedent of legitimacy. We still have much to
learn about procedural justice, access to justice, and legitimacy in online settings. However, our work
makes distinct theoretical and empirical contributions to the literature by incorporating access-to-
justice perceptions and the moderating role of income level in explaining how people come to view
online proceedings, courts, and the law as legitimate. We conclude that our data are consistent with
several (but not all) of our hypotheses regarding the dynamics underlying the perceptions of system
legitimacy.
First, despite the thin nature of online communication, we find that procedural-justice percep-
tions are a strong predictor of legitimacy perceptions even in online proceedings. This result may tie
to particular traits of online communication (Ebner & Greenberg, 2020). While some lament the lack
of rich, real-time physical communication when interacting online (Sternlight, 2020), certain features
 15405893, 2023, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lasr.12653 by National Health And Medical Research Council, Wiley Online Library on [06/10/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
206 LEGITIMACY AND ONLINE PROCEEDINGS

of online exchanges may actually enhance a party’s experience and thus their procedural-justice per-
ceptions. For example, limiting physical interaction also mitigates negative features of in-court pro-
ceedings, such as long waits and a rushed process, which can convey disrespect and inhibit voice. In
addition, some litigants may find it uncomfortable to address a judge face to face and would prefer
to “voice” their story in writing. Indeed, rather than a “second-class” procedural scheme, online
asynchronous proceedings may amply serve litigant procedural-justice needs and, for some people,
even be an improvement. Another explanation may lie in people having different expectations for
online proceedings—that is, people may experience proceedings in light of what is possible given the
medium, and no one expects rich, physical interaction in an easy-to-access forum for written
exchanges. Expectations, preferences, and values underlying procedural-justice experiences may be
undergoing transformation (Turkle, 2011). Future research should explore the precise components
of procedural-justice experiences in online settings (and indeed in each type of online setting).
Second, consistent with our hypothesis, we find no evidence that instrumental concerns in the
form of outcome-favorability perceptions predict legitimacy perceptions in online proceedings. This
finding may be surprising because online spaces may seem especially conducive to instrumental
motivations. Our results nevertheless mirror research in face-to-face settings that show, at most, the
marginal importance of instrumental concerns to legitimacy. Perhaps the explanation lies in legiti-
macy perceptions being rooted in deep-seated psychological needs and motivations that are unlikely
to be satisfied by news of a favorable outcome.
Third, our study adds a new angle to the familiar normative versus instrumental lens on legiti-
macy by incorporating access to justice, a more structural dimension of the legal system. Online dis-
pute resolution seems like a natural setting to examine the role of access in generating legitimacy
because increasing access has been one of the driving forces behind the design and adoption of
online proceedings. Our data confirm the potential importance of access-to-justice perceptions in
predicting legitimacy perceptions. Thus, accessibility may not only be a core consideration in how to
design online proceedings but also in how users experience those proceedings. One important ques-
tion is whether access-to-justice perceptions, which may naturally attach to the unique features of
online proceedings, will also prove central to how people experience traditional procedures, a possi-
bility future research should explore.
Fourth, we present tentative evidence of a connection between access-to-justice perceptions and
intent to comply with traffic laws, hinting that innovations in access may offer an additional route
toward improving compliance. We also detect some indication that, for lower-income parties, higher
outcome-favorability perceptions may positively correlate with compliance intentions. Both patterns
appear to hold even when accounting for legitimacy perceptions. We also uncover a connection
between perceived legitimacy—as shaped by procedural-justice and access-to-justice perceptions—
and intentions to comply. However, we advise against relying on these results without corroborating
studies using better data and measures—after all, we measure compliance using self-reported
intentions, which are susceptible to social-desirability bias and may not be useful predictors of
actual behavior. However, we hope these patterns will motivate future rigorous work on compliance,
including attempts to replicate these patterns—testing, for example, whether access-to-justice per-
ceptions predict compliance and whether people with below-average incomes place some weight on
instrumental concerns in their compliance behavior, possibly a function of relative economic
disadvantage.
Many outstanding questions remain. While our research documents the potential importance of
access-to-justice perceptions in accounting for legitimacy judgments, it does not explain why access-
to-justice perceptions may matter, assuming any causal relationship exists at all. Research provides
several empirically supported explanations for why experiencing procedural justice matters to indi-
viduals when they draw conclusions about system legitimacy (Tyler & Blader, 2003; Tyler &
Jackson, 2014). Future research should likewise explore the reasons that access to justice might mat-
ter to legitimacy perceptions. One possible explanation relates to the structural nature of access to
justice. Specifically, people may place value on access because it reflects the system’s principles and
 15405893, 2023, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lasr.12653 by National Health And Medical Research Council, Wiley Online Library on [06/10/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
MENTOVICH ET AL. 207

the degree to which the system respects an individual’s legal rights and innate worth. Access-oriented
design may also address the same needs that the procedural-justice literature emphasizes—such as
the importance of being shown respect. Indeed, elements of procedural justice and access to justice
can overlap, as we show in our alternative model of access to justice in our Appendix A. Thus, for
example, allowing parties more time to contemplate next steps as part of an asynchronous procedure
could translate into enhanced access, but it could also fulfill parties’ need for respect and voice.
Future research should investigate the distinctions and overlap between the concepts of access to jus-
tice and procedural justice as predictors of legitimacy.
Given the unique attributes of online proceedings and the importance of access to justice for peo-
ple with few resources, the potential role of socioeconomic status in moderating the relationships
that access-to-justice and procedural-justice perceptions have with legitimacy perceptions requires
more attention. We find some evidence that access-to-justice perceptions have a stronger empirical
relationship with legitimacy perceptions among lower-income online litigants than higher-income
litigants. At the same time, procedural-justice research suggests that such perceptions predict legiti-
macy more-or-less uniformly across income levels. We do not corroborate this claim: procedural jus-
tice in our data appears relatively more important among people from higher socioeconomic
backgrounds. Moreover, some research shows that minorities typically place greater weight on
procedural-justice considerations (Mentovich, Ben-Porat, et al., 2020; Sunshine & Tyler, 2003), but
we do not observe this pattern with our lower-income group. Income may operate differently from
other social-identity features, perhaps generating group-based consciousness in a different way or
not at all. Alternatively, access to justice, a structural factor, may be more important to those who
encounter significant barriers early in disputes. It may be only after lower-income parties overcome
these barriers that they reorient toward the more expressive and symbolic concerns associated with
procedural justice.
The findings regarding the role of socioeconomic status in altering the relative importance of
legitimacy’s antecedents are significant for several reasons. For one, socioeconomic status typically
serves as a mere control variable in legitimacy studies, with any function it may carry out as a mod-
erator left unclear. Second, even in work that foregrounds socioeconomic status, researchers use
measures like income to predict procedural-justice perceptions, not legitimacy perceptions
(e.g., Tyler & Lind, 2002). However, overall, research generally does not identify any link between a
party’s socioeconomic status and their procedural-justice perceptions (Tyler, 1994). By contrast, we
explore the different and distinct idea that, even if it does not alter perceptions, socioeconomic status
may change the relative weight given to these perceptions in accounting for legitimacy views.
Our research also has implications for the connection between dispute system design and party
perceptions. While design questions are not limited to online proceedings, the online setting lends
itself to “design thinking” and gives rise to more design options than typical face-to-face justice set-
tings (Schmitz & Zeleznikow, 2022; Sela, 2021). Thus, we should understand our findings in the con-
text of the design of the proceedings we study. The impact of the change in medium on party
perceptions is likely to be multi-directional and highly dependent on the precise design choices of
the specific online proceeding in question. To understand procedural-justice, access-to-justice, and
legitimacy perceptions in online legal proceedings, we should systematically study a wide-range of
online court processes and explore how variations in system design influence party perceptions.
Our study has several limitations. First, we draw on one particular set of online traffic proceed-
ings. Questions of generalizability arise with respect to the platform and the type of case. Future
research should examine a wider array of online proceedings. We admit that traffic cases are not
broadly representative of all legal disputes—they are simple cases that carry low stakes, concern
almost uniformly unrepresented defendants, and involve an imbalance of power between individuals
and the state as parties to the dispute. Still, because of their simplicity, traffic cases are a natural can-
didate for online proceedings and have been the most prominent example of case resolution occur-
ring online. More importantly, traffic cases are the quintessential and sometimes the only legal
disputes for many people—they make up a majority of cases in the United States—and they involve
 15405893, 2023, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lasr.12653 by National Health And Medical Research Council, Wiley Online Library on [06/10/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
208 LEGITIMACY AND ONLINE PROCEEDINGS

the government accusing an individual of misconduct in a governmental tribunal. Thus, how some-
one experiences traffic court may have a significant impact on how they view the legitimacy of
courts, law enforcement, and the legal system (O’Neil & Prescott, 2019).
Second, our access-to-justice construct is specific to the characteristics of the setting we study:
unrepresented parties who participate in online proceedings. Research on access to justice often
focuses on the need for an attorney, a concern that relates to costs, but not exclusively (Rhode, 2001;
Sandefur, 2014). While representation eases some access barriers, such as the complexity of proceed-
ings and fear of participation, it also raises certain challenges (Zimerman & Tyler, 2010). To the
extent that online proceedings expand to include proceedings with legal representation, measures of
access to justice will need to be revised accordingly.
Third, we concede that our measure of access-to-justice “perceptions” is distinct from objective
indicators of access. The latter category looks to actual performance metrics (such as the number of
court users that belong to lower socioeconomic strata and the actual costs incurred by different cate-
gories of court users), while the former revolves around subjective evaluations of one’s individual
experience. Indigent parties might experience court procedures as accessible even when objective
indicators suggest otherwise, perhaps diverting attention from objective structural barriers that are
more resistant to change (Blasi, 2004). This type of critique against relying on party perceptions is
not new; indeed, some worry that focus on procedural-justice perceptions might lead to “sham
procedures,” particularly when members of disempowered groups are involved (Welsh, 2017). Nev-
ertheless, structural changes that do not produce positive subjective perceptions are unlikely to suc-
ceed, and given their significance for legitimacy and compliance, researchers should collect and
study subjective access-to-justice perceptions alongside other objective and subjective indicators
(Kulp & Schmitz, 2020).
Fourth, we study only the responses of litigants who participate in online proceedings—that is,
people who overcome various obstacles to resolve their dispute online. At a minimum, our respon-
dents recognize some of their legal risks and opportunities and successfully invoke a legal avenue
of redress (Sandefur, 2014). First-generation digital-divide concerns over technological infra-
structure and internet access (Creutzfeldt, 2021) have given way to second-generation concerns
over differences in the “willingness and ability to use the internet” (Denvir & Selvarajah, 2022).
Studies reveal not only group-level differences in online behavioral patterns but also the many
ways by which social and economic disparities shape users’ understanding of online information
(Fairlie, 2017). Fortunately, the design of online proceedings can address some of these concerns
(Bulinski & Prescott, 2021). For example, asynchronous, text-based processes offer litigants more
flexibility and make receiving support from family and friends easier (Susskind, 2019). Of course,
traditional proceedings erect many access barriers of their own, and many people “access the
Internet much more easily and comfortably than they do traditional justice institutions and pro-
cesses” (Salter, 2017, p. 123).
Fifth, we collect litigant responses from only five courthouses comprising two districts in a single
US state, which may limit the generalizability of our results. Moreover, even within this specific
area’s population, our sample may not be representative of those who use online proceedings
because participants volunteer to take part in the study. Selection bias may drive our results if, for
example, only participants with extreme experiences choose to participate in research like ours. To
mitigate these concerns, we control for participant demographics and education levels and consider
income explicitly in our analysis.
Finally, because our study uses survey responses and we have no access to exogenous variation in
access-to-justice and procedural-justice perceptions, we are unable to draw causal inferences about
the connection between these perceptions and views about legitimacy. We see procedural justice and
access to justice as antecedents of legitimacy, but the relationship may run in the opposite direction
or turn on factors we do not observe. For example, those who view the legal system as more legiti-
mate may also ascribe greater fairness and accessibility to their online experience for unknown rea-
sons. Nevertheless, our approach is the commonly accepted methodology for investigating the
 15405893, 2023, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lasr.12653 by National Health And Medical Research Council, Wiley Online Library on [06/10/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
MENTOVICH ET AL. 209

legitimacy of the legal system due to the difficulty of deploying experimental designs in such con-
texts, and at a minimum, our results present provocative descriptive correlations that we hope will
drive future research.

CONCLUSION
Despite the rapid growth in online court proceedings, research into how users experience these pro-
ceedings is just beginning. Analysis of legitimacy perceptions and their determinants online is almost
nonexistent. This study is the first to provide empirical insight into how changes from centuries-old,
face-to-face hearings to novel online proceedings may matter for the underpinnings of legal legiti-
macy. We find that positive assessments of access to justice and procedural justice in online proceed-
ings predict more robust legitimacy perceptions. We also find that access-to-justice perceptions
appear relatively more important in explaining legitimacy views among lower-income litigants. Our
results suggest that technology can generate novel procedural options that are at least compatible
with and may advance access to justice, procedural justice, and system legitimacy. Technology is no
panacea, but thoughtful design choices accompanied by careful attention to litigant experiences may
give rise to new and exciting opportunities for justice while enhancing the legitimacy of our legal
institutions.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We are grateful to Tom Tyler and participants of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Legal Studies at
the University of Toronto for helpful comments and to German Marquez Alcala for excellent
research assistance. This research was supported by the Israeli Science Foundation, Grant No. 492/
17. Disclosure: Prescott founded Court Innovations Inc., which developed Matterhorn, an ODR plat-
form that operates in many states. Prescott no longer has an equity interest in Court Innovations or
its parent company, but he may benefit from a licensing arrangement the companies have with the
University of Michigan.

R EF E R EN C E S
Albiston, Catherine R., and Rebecca L. Sandefur. 2013. “Expanding the Empirical Study of Access to Justice.” Wisconsin Law
Review 2013: 101–20.
Bannon, Alicia L., and Douglas Keith. 2021. “Remote Court: Principles for Virtual Proceedings during the COVID-19 Pan-
demic and Beyond.” Northwestern University Law Review 115: 1875–920.
Blader, Steven L., and Tom R. Tyler. 2003. “What Constitutes Fairness In Work Settings? A Four-Component Model of Proce-
dural Justice.” Human Resource Management Review 13(1): 107–26.
Blasi, Gary. 2004. “How Much Access? How Much Justice?” Fordham Law Review 73: 865–82.
Blasi, Gary. 2009. “Framing Access to Justice: Beyond Perceived Justice for Individuals.” Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review 42:
913–48.
Bottoms, Anthony, and Justice Tankebe. 2012. “Beyond Procedural Justice: A Dialogic Approach to Legitimacy in Criminal
Justice.” Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology 102: 119–70.
Bradford, Ben, Katrin Hohl, Jonathan Jackson, and Sarah MacQueen. 2015. “Obeying the Rules of the Road: Procedural Jus-
tice, Social Identity, and Normative Compliance.” Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice 31(2): 171–91.
Bradford, Ben, Kristina Murphy, and Jonathan Jackson. 2014. “Officers as Mirrors: Policing, Procedural Justice and the (Re)
Production of Social Identity.” The British Journal of Criminology 54(4): 527–50.
Bulinski, Maximilian A., and J.J. Prescott. 2016. “Online Case Resolution Systems: Enhancing Access, Fairness, Accuracy, and
Efficiency.” Michigan Journal of Race and Law 21(2): 205–49.
Bulinski, Maximilian A., and J.J. Prescott. 2021. “Designing Legal Experiences: Online Communication and Resolution in
Courts.” In Legal Informatics, edited by Daniel Martin Katz, Ron Dolin, and Michael J. Bommarito, 430–48. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Cabral, James E., Abhijeet Chavan, Thomas M. Clarke, John Greacen, Bonnie Rose Hough, Linda Rexer, Jane Ribadeneyra, and
Richard Zorza. 2012. “Using Technology to Enhance Access to Justice.” Harvard Journal of Law & Technology 26: 241–324.
Cappelletti, Mauro. 1993. “Alternative Dispute Resolution Processes within the Framework of the World-Wide Access-to-
Justice Movement.” Modern Law Review 56(3): 282–96.
 15405893, 2023, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lasr.12653 by National Health And Medical Research Council, Wiley Online Library on [06/10/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
210 LEGITIMACY AND ONLINE PROCEEDINGS

Cappelletti, Mauro, and Bryant G. Garth. 1978. “Access to Justice: The Newest Wave in the Worldwide Movement to Make
Rights Effective.” Buffalo Law Review 27: 181–292.
Cappelletti, Mauro, Bryant G. Garth, and Klaus-Friedrich Koch. 1978. Access to Justice. Milan: Giuffrè.
Colman, Jeffrey D., and Danielle E. Hirsch. 2014. “Increasing Access to Justice for the Elderly and Others: The Illinois Experi-
ence.” Experience 24(1): 31–4.
Creutzfeldt, Naomi. 2021. “Towards a Digital Legal Consciousness?” European Journal of Law and Technology 12(3): 816.
Creutzfeldt, Naomi, and Ben Bradford. 2016. “Dispute Resolution Outside of Courts: Procedural Justice and Decision Accep-
tance Among Users of Ombuds Services in the UK.” Law and Society Review 50(4): 985–1016.
De Cremer, David, and Steven L. Blader. 2006. “Why Do People Care About Procedural Fairness? The Importance of Belong-
ingness in Responding and Attending to Procedures.” European Journal of Social Psychology 36(2): 211–28.
Denvir, Catrina, and Amanda D. Selvarajah. 2022. “Safeguarding Access to Justice in the Age of the Online Court.” Modern
Law Review 85: 25–68.
Ebner, Noam, and Elayne E. Greenberg. 2020. “Strengthening Online Dispute Resolution Justice.” Washington University Jour-
nal of Law and Policy 63: 65–118.
Engler, Russell. 2010. “Connecting Self-Representation to Civil Gideon: What Existing Data Reveal About When Counsel Is
Most Needed.” Fordham Urban Law Journal 37: 37–92.
Factor, Roni, Juan Carlos Castillo, and Arye Rattner. 2014. “Procedural Justice, Minorities, and Religiosity.” Police Practice
and Research 15(2): 130–42.
Fagan, Jeffrey. 2008. “Legitimacy and Criminal Justice: Introduction.” The Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law 6: 123–40.
Fairlie, Robert. 2017. “Have we Finally Bridged the Digital Divide? Smart Phone and Internet Use Patterns by Race and Eth-
nicity.” First Monday 22(9). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v22i9.7919.
Felstiner, William L. F., Richard L. Abel, and Austin Sarat. 1980. “The Emergence and Transformation of Disputes: Naming,
Blaming, Claiming….” Law and Society Review 15(3): 631–54.
Franklyn, Ramona, Tracey Budd, Rose Verrill, and Maria Willoughby. 2017. Findings from the Legal Problem and Resolution
Survey, 2014–15. London: Ministry of Justice.
Galanter, Marc. 1981. “Justice in Many Rooms: Courts, Private Ordering, and Indigenous Law.” Journal of Legal Pluralism
and Unofficial Law 13: 1–47.
Galanter, Marc. 2010. “Access to Justice in a World of Expanding Social Capability.” Fordham Urban Law Journal 37: 115–28.
Gordon-Larsen, Penny, Linda S. Adair, and Barry M. Popkin. 2003. “The Relationship of Ethnicity, Socioeconomic Factors,
and Overweight in U.S. Adolescents.” Obesity Research 11(1): 121–9.
Greenberg, Jerald, and Tom R. Tyler. 1987. “Why Procedural Justice in Organizations?” Social Justice Research 1(2): 127–42.
Hearne, Brittany N., and Michael D. Niño. 2022. “Understanding How Race, Ethnicity, and Gender Shape Mask-Wearing
Adherence During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Evidence from the COVID Impact Survey.” Journal of Racial and Ethnic
Health Disparities 9: 176–83.
Hernandez, Saul E. 2008. Spanish Speaker Perceptions of Access and Fairness of the Superior Court of New Jersey in Vicinage
XV and Improvement Recommendations. New Jersey: Superior Court of New Jersey.
Hertogh, Marc. 2015. “What Moves Joe Driver? How Perceptions of Legitimacy Shape Regulatory Compliance among Dutch
Traffic Offenders.” International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice 43(2): 214–34.
Hinds, Lyn, and Kristina Murphy. 2007. “Public Satisfaction with Police: Using Procedural Justice to Improve Police Legiti-
macy.” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology 40(1): 27–42.
Hollander-Blumoff, Rebecca. 2011. “The Psychology of Procedural Justice in the Federal Courts.” Hastings Law Journal 63: 127–78.
Hollander-Blumoff, Rebecca, and Tom R. Tyler. 2011. “Procedural Justice and the Rule of Law: Fostering Legitimacy in Alter-
native Dispute Resolution.” Journal of Dispute Resolution 2011(1): 1–19.
Hou, Youyang, Cliff Lampe, Maximilian Bulinski, and J.J. Prescott. 2017. “Factors in Fairness and Emotion in Online Case
Resolution Systems.” In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2511–22.
Hough, Mike, Jonathan Jackson, and Ben Bradford. 2013a. “Trust in Justice and the Legitimacy of Legal Authorities: Topline
Findings from a European Comparative Study.” In The Routledge Handbook of European Criminology, edited by Sophie
Body-Gendrot, Mike Hough, Klara Kerezsi, René Lévy, and Sonja Snacken, 243–65. Oxon: Routledge.
Hough, Mike, Jonathan Jackson, and Ben Bradford. 2013b. “Legitimacy, Trust, and Compliance: An Empirical Test of Proce-
dural Justice Theory Using the European Social Survey.” In Legitimacy and Criminal Justice: An International Explora-
tion, edited by Justice Tankebe and Alison Liebling, 326–52. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jackson, Jonathan, Ben Bradford, Mike Hough, Jouni Kuha, Sally Stares, Sally Widdop, Rory Fitzgerald, Maria Yordanova, and
Todor Galev. 2011. “Developing European Indicators of Trust in Justice.” European Journal of Criminology 8(4): 267–85.
Jackson, Jonathan, Ben Bradford, Mike Hough, Andy Myhill, Paul Quinton, and Tom R. Tyler. 2012. “Why Do People Com-
ply with the Law? Legitimacy and the Influence of Legal Institutions.” The British Journal of Criminology 52(6): 1051–71.
Johnson, Earl. 1978. “Thinking about Access: A Preliminary Typology of Possible Strategies.” In Access to Justice, edited by
Mauro Cappelletti, Bryant G. Garth, and Klaus-Friedrich Koch. Milan: Giuffrè.
Johnson, Richard R. 2004. “Citizen Expectations of Police Traffic Stop Behavior.” Policing: An International Journal 27(4):
487–97.
 15405893, 2023, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lasr.12653 by National Health And Medical Research Council, Wiley Online Library on [06/10/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
MENTOVICH ET AL. 211

Jones, Angela M., Larry Heuer, Steven Penrod, and David Udell. 2019. “Perceptions of Access to Justice Among Unre-
presented Tenants: An Examination of Procedural Justice and Deservingness in New York City Housing Court.” Journal
of Forensic Psychology Research and Practice 19(1): 72–91.
Kauffman, Brittany, Logan Cornett, Martin Gramatikov, Rodrigo Núñez, Isabella Banks, Maurits Barendrecht, and Jelmer
Brouwer. 2021. Justice Needs and Satisfaction in The United States of America 2021: Legal Problems in Daily Life. The
Institute or the Advancement of the American Legal System and the Hague Institute for Innovation of Law https://iaals.
du.edu/sites/default/files/documents/publications/justice-needs-and-satisfaction-us.pdf
Kebede, Senay, and Aimin Wang. 2022. “Organizational Justice and Employee Readiness for Change: The Mediating Role of
Perceived Organizational Support.” Frontiers in Psychology 13: 806109. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.806109.
Kelley, Harold H., and John W. Thibaut. 1978. Interpersonal Relations: A Theory of Interdependence. New York: Wiley.
Kim, Hyounggon, Chia-Kuen Cheng, and Joseph T. O’Leary. 2007. “Understanding Participation Patterns and Trends in
Tourism Cultural Attractions.” Tourism Management 28: 1366–71.
Komorita, Samuel S., Darius K.-S. Chan, and Craig Parks. 1993. “The Effects of Reward Structure and Reciprocity in Social
Dilemmas.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 29(3): 252–67.
Kulp, Heather S., and Amy J. Schmitz. 2020. “Real Feedback from Real People: Emphasizing User-Centric Designs for Court
ODR.” Dispute Resolution Magazine 26(2): 6–12.
Lind, E. Allan, Carol T. Kulik, Maureen Ambrose, and Maria V. de Vera Park. 1993. “Individual and Corporate Dispute Reso-
lution: Using Procedural Fairness as a Decision Heuristic.” Administrative Science Quarterly 38: 224–51.
Lind, E. Allan, and Tom R. Tyler. 1988. The Social Psychology of Procedural Justice. New York: Springer.
MacCoun, Robert J., E. Allan Lind, Deborah R. Hensler, David L. Bryant, and Patricia A. Ebener. 1988. Alternative
Adjudication: An Evaluation of the New Jersey Automobile Arbitration Program. Santa Monica, CA: The
RAND Corporation.
Meares, Tracey L. 2002. “Signaling, Legitimacy, and Compliance: A Comment on Posner’s Law and Social Norms and Crimi-
nal Law Policy.” University of Richmond Law Review 36(2): 407–22.
Mentovich, Avital, Guy Ben-Porat, Natalie Levy, Phillip A. Goff, and Tom Tyler. 2020. “Policing Alienated Minorities in
Divided Cities.” Regulation & Governance 14(3): 531–50.
Mentovich, Avital, J.J. Prescott, and Orna Rabinovich-Einy. 2020. “Are Litigation Outcome Disparities Inevitable? Courts,
Technology, and the Future of Impartiality.” Alabama Law Review 71(4): 893–979.
Mentovich, Avital, Eunho Rhee, and Tom R. Tyler. 2014. “My Life For a Voice: The Influence of Voice on Health-Care Deci-
sions.” Social Justice Research 27(1): 99–117.
Miller, Richard E., and Austin Sarat. 1980. “Grievances, Claims, and Disputes: Assessing the Adversary Culture.” Law and
Society Review 15(3–4): 525–66.
Mor, Sagit. 2017. “With Access and Justice for All.” Cardozo Law Review 39: 611–47.
Murphy, Kristina. 2005. “Regulating More Effectively: The Relationship between Procedural Justice, Legitimacy, and Tax
Non-compliance.” Journal of Law and Society 32(4): 562–89.
Nagel, Thomas. 1987. “Moral Conflict and Political Legitimacy.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 16(3): 215–40.
Nagin, Daniel S., and Cody W. Telep. 2017. “Procedural Justice and Legal Compliance.” Annual Review of Law and Social Sci-
ence 13: 5–28.
Niblett, Anthony, and Albert H. Yoon. 2017. “Unintended Consequences: The Regressive Effects of Increased Access to
Courts.” Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 14(1): 5–30.
O’Neil, Meghan M., and J.J. Prescott. 2019. “Targeting Poverty in the Courts: Improving the Measurement of Ability to Pay.”
Law and Contemporary Problems 82: 199–226.
Peterson, Amelia, Hanna Dumont, Marc Lafuente, and Nancy Law. 2018. “Understanding Innovative Pedagogies: Key Themes
to Analyse New Approaches to Teaching and Learning.” OECD Education Working Papers No. 172, Paris.
Pleasence, Pascoe, and Nigel Balmer. 2018. “Measuring the Accessibility and Equality of Civil Justice.” The Hague Journal on
the Rule of Law 10(2): 255–94.
Prescott, J.J. 2017. “Improving Access to Justice in State Courts with Platform Technology.” Vanderbilt Law Review 70(6):
1993–2050.
Prescott, J.J. 2023. “Using ODR Platforms to Level the Playing Field: Improving Pro Se Litigation through ODR Design.” In
Legal Tech and the Future of Civil Justice, edited by David Freeman Engstrom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Prescott, J.J., and Alexander Sanchez. 2019. “Platform Procedure: Using Technology to Facilitate (Efficient) Civil Settlement.”
In Selection and Decision in Judicial Process around the World: Empirical Inquiries, edited by Yun-chien Chang, 30–72.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rabinovich-Einy, Orna. 2021. “The Past, Present, and Future of Online Dispute Resolution.” Current Legal Problems 74(1):
125–48.
Rabinovich-Einy, Orna, and Ethan Katsh. 2017. “The New New Courts.” The American University Law Review 67: 165–215.
Reisig, Michael D., and Camille Lloyd. 2009. “Procedural Justice, Police Legitimacy, and Helping the Police Fight Crime.”
Police Quarterly 12(1): 42–62.
Rhode, Deborah L. 2001. “Access to Justice.” Fordham Law Review 69(5): 1785–820.
Rhode, Deborah L. 2004. Access to Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rhode, Deborah L. 2014. “Access to Justice: A Roadmap for Reform.” Fordham Urban Law Journal 41: 1227–57.
 15405893, 2023, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lasr.12653 by National Health And Medical Research Council, Wiley Online Library on [06/10/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
212 LEGITIMACY AND ONLINE PROCEEDINGS

Rosenfeld, Michel. 2001. “The Rule of Law and the Legitimacy of Constitutional Democracy.” Southern California Law Review
74(5): 1307–52.
Rule, Colin. 2012. “Quantifying the Economic Benefits of Effective Redress: Large E-Commerce Data Sets and the Cost-Benefit
Case for Investing in Dispute Resolution.” University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review 34(4): 767–77.
Salter, Shannon. 2017. “Online Dispute Resolution and Justice System Integration: British Columbia’s Civil Resolution Tribu-
nal.” Windsor Yearbook of Access to Justice 34(1): 112–29.
Sandefur, Rebecca L. 2008. “Access to Civil Justice and Race, Class, and Gender Inequality.” Annual Review of Sociology 34:
339–58.
Sandefur, Rebecca L. 2014. Accessing Justice in the Contemporary USA: Findings from the Community Needs and Services
Study. Champaign, IL: American Bar Foundation.
Schmitz, Amy J. 2019. “Expanding Access to Remedies through E-Court Initiatives.” Buffalo Law Review 67: 89–163.
Schmitz, Amy J. 2020. “Measuring ‘Access to Justice’ in the Rush to Digitize.” Fordham Law Review 88: 2381–406.
Schmitz, Amy J., and John Zeleznikow. 2022. “Intelligent Legal Tech to Empower Self-Represented Litigants.” Columbia Sci-
ence and Technology Law Review 23(1): 142–91.
Sela, Ayelet. 2016. “Streamlining Justice: How Online Courts Can Resolve the Challenges of Pro Se Litigation.” Cornell Journal
of Law and Public Policy 26: 331–88.
Sela, Ayelet. 2019. “E-Nudging Justice: The Role of Digital Choice Architecture in Online Courts.” Journal of Dispute Resolu-
tion 2019(2): 127–63.
Sela, Ayelet. 2021. “Diversity by Design: Improving Access to Justice in Online Courts with Adaptive Court Interfaces.” The
Law & Ethics of Human Rights 15(1): 125–52.
Sourdin, Tania, Bin Li, and Donna Marie McNamara. 2020. “Court Innovations and Access to Justice in Times of Crisis.”
Health Policy and Technology 9(4): 447–53.
Sternlight, Jean R. 2020. “Pouring a Little Psychological Cold Water on Online Dispute Resolution.” Journal of Dispute Resolu-
tion 2020(1): 1–30.
Sunshine, Jason, and Tom R. Tyler. 2003. “The Role of Procedural Justice and Legitimacy in Shaping Public Support for Polic-
ing.” Law and Society Review 37(3): 513–48.
Susskind, Richard. 2019. Online Courts and the Future of Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tankebe, Justice, Michael D. Reisig, and Xia Wang. 2016. “A Multidimensional Model of Police Legitimacy: A Cross-Cultural
Assessment.” Law and Human Behavior 40(1): 11–22.
Thompson, Darin. 2015. “Creating New Pathways to Justice Using Simple Artificial Intelligence and Online Dispute Resolu-
tion.” International Journal of Online Dispute Resolution 2: 4–53.
Thornburg, Elizabeth G. 2020. “Observing Online Courts: Lessons from the Pandemic.” Family Law Quarterly 54: 181–244.
Turkle, Sherry. 2011. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books.
Tyler, Tom R. 1989. “The Psychology of Procedural Justice: A Test of the Group-Value Model.” Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology 57(5): 830–8.
Tyler, Tom R. 1994. “Psychological Models of the Justice Motive: Antecedents of Distributive and Procedural Justice.” Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology 67(5): 850–63.
Tyler, Tom R. 2003. “Procedural Justice, Legitimacy, and the Effective Rule of Law.” Crime and Justice 30: 283–357.
Tyler, Tom R. 2006a. “Psychological Perspectives on Legitimacy and Legitimation.” Annual Review of Psychology 57: 375–400.
Tyler, Tom R. 2006b. Why People Obey the Law. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Tyler, Tom R. 2007. “Procedural Justice and the Courts.” Court Review 44(1): 26–31.
Tyler, Tom R. 2008. “Psychology and Institutional Design.” The Review of Law & Economics 4(3): 801–87.
Tyler, Tom R., and Steven L. Blader. 2003. “The Group Engagement Model: Procedural Justice, Social Identity, and Coopera-
tive Behavior.” Personality and Social Psychology Review 7(4): 349–61.
Tyler, Tom R., Peter Degoey, and Heather Smith. 1996. “Understanding Why the Justice of Group Procedures Matters: A Test
of the Psychological Dynamics of the Group-Value Model.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 70(5): 913–30.
Tyler, Tom R., Jeffrey Fagan, and Amanda Geller. 2014. “Street Stops and Police Legitimacy: Teachable Moments in Young
Urban Men’s Socialization.” Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 11(4): 751–85.
Tyler, Tom R., and Jonathan Jackson. 2014. “Popular Legitimacy and the Exercise of Legal Authority: Motivating Compliance,
Cooperation, and Engagement.” Psychology, Public Policy, and Law 20(1): 78–95.
Tyler, Tom R., and E. Allan Lind. 2002. “Procedural Justice.” In Handbook of Justice Research in Law, edited by Joseph
Sanders and V. Lee Hamilton, 65–92. New York: Springer.
Tyler, Tom R., Avital Mentovich, and Sagarika Satyavada. 2014. “What Motivates Adherence to Medical Recommendations?
The Procedural Justice Approach to Gaining Deference in the Medical Arena.” Regulation & Governance 8(3): 350–70.
van Prooijen, Jan-Willem, Kees van den Bos, and Henk A. M. Wilke. 2004. “Group Belongingness and Procedural Justice:
Social Inclusion and Exclusion by Peers Affects the Psychology of Voice.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
87(1): 66–79.
Welsh, Nancy A. 2001. “The Thinning Vision of Self-Determination in Court-Connected Mediation: The Inevitable Price of
Institutionalization?” Harvard Negotiation Law Review 6: 1–96.
Welsh, Nancy A. 2017. “Do you Believe in Magic?: Self-Determination and Procedural Justice Meet Inequality in Court-
Connected Mediation.” SMU Law Review 70: 721–62.
 15405893, 2023, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lasr.12653 by National Health And Medical Research Council, Wiley Online Library on [06/10/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
MENTOVICH ET AL. 213

Williamson, Oliver E. 1993. “Calculativeness, Trust, and Economic Organization.” The Journal of Law and Economics 36(1):
453–86.
Wolfe, Scott E., Justin Nix, Robert Kaminski, and Jeff Rojek. 2016. “Is the Effect of Procedural Justice on Police Legitimacy
Invariant? Testing the Generality of Procedural Justice and Competing Antecedents of Legitimacy.” Journal of Quantita-
tive Criminology 32: 253–82.
Zimerman, Nourit, and Tom R. Tyler. 2010. “Between Access to Counsel and Access to Justice: A Psychological Perspective.”
Fordham Urban Law Journal 37: 473–507.

A U T H O R B I O G R AP H IE S

Avital Mentovich is a Professor of Criminology at the University of Haifa Faculty of Law. Her
research focuses on procedural justice, legitimacy, online dispute resolution, and empirical
approaches to law and law enforcement.
J.J. Prescott is the Henry King Ransom Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law
School. His research interests revolve around criminal law, access to justice, employment law,
and the dynamics of civil litigation, particularly settlement.
Orna Rabinovich-Einy is a Professor of Law at the University of Haifa Faculty of Law. Her
research interests include procedural law, alternative dispute resolution, online dispute resolu-
tion, and dispute system design.

SUPPORTING INFORMATION
Additional supporting information can be found online in the Supporting Information section at the
end of this article.

How to cite this article: Mentovich, Avital, J.J. Prescott, and Orna Rabinovich-Einy. 2023.
“Legitimacy and Online Proceedings: Procedural Justice, Access to Justice, and the Role of
Income.” Law & Society Review 57(2): 189–213. https://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12653