Summary
Institutions can promise protection while leaving people unable to obtain it. This paper asks how prevention, accessible remedies, and the risk of regulatory capture should enter the assessment of institutional justice. Its mathematical models show why delayed remedies and irreversible harm can limit what correction achieves, and how capture can change the balance between preventing violations and correcting them. The results depend on explicit assumptions; they do not offer a complete theory of justice or an empirical estimate of capture.
Abstract
Economic institutions can announce justified entitlements while failing to secure them. This article argues that institutional admissibility must depend on both substantive protections and their implementation. It defends a conditional case for effective adjudicative access, acknowledges the resulting conflict with unrestricted Pareto comparisons, and separates institutional reliability from permission to violate. A general stochastic bound shows that unavoidable delay and a positive probability of irreversible harm limit what correction can achieve, without requiring Markov transitions. A tractable model then distinguishes prevention from correction under capture. With general convex separable costs, greater capture increases prevention under the stated technology, while the direction of corrective effort depends on a curvature condition. Oversight and screening expand the design space but do not constitute a political equilibrium model of capture. An income example tests when a protected claim warrants constraint status and distinguishes universal protection from transfers to a fixed group. Numerical illustrations and an administrative appeals example clarify the limits of aggregate performance measures. The contribution is a conditional account of protection under imperfect implementation, supported by explicit bounds and comparative statics, rather than a complete theory of justice or a new theory of regulatory capture.
Keywords: institutional legitimacy; welfare economics; adjudicative access; regulatory capture; non-ideal theory.
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How to cite
Skouras, George. 2026. Justice under Imperfect Implementation. Working paper, October 24. https://george-skouras.com/articles/justice-under-imperfect-implementation/.