This article examines economic justice in nineteenth-century Mexico City through analysis of small-claims conflicts—juicios verbales. After the promulgation of the 1812 Cádiz Constitution, this centuries-old tradition of judicial arbitration was shaped by liberal constitutionalism. A new class of officials, the alcaldes constitucionales, were elected by residents to decide cases. Cádiz liberalism inaugurated a new world. What happened when people faced a classic problem, when they did not pay their debts? Microeconomic history—the quantitative and qualitative study of the economic relationships, decisions, and actions of individuals, households, and small enterprises—exposes the workings of economic justice. From 1813 to 1863, tens of thousands of residents pressed their claims before magistrates. As this article shows, justice grounded in Cádiz liberalism was relatively effective for ordinary people and evinced a gender fairness. These small-claims conflicts might seem a petty world of negligible amounts and narrow-minded disputes, but analyzed together, they challenge conventional interpretations about institutional deficiency and historical underdevelopment. Cádiz liberalism established a judicial institution to protect property rights, especially for creditors, that enjoyed broad legitimacy.

Mental health services are experiencing unprecedented levels of demand from clients during COVID resulting in longer wait lists and therapist burnout. As Nemoyer et al. (2019) point out, minorities experience a higher burden of mental illness while having less access and lower quality treatments. COVID has increased demands for mental health services even further, creating bottlenecks of care, therapist burnout, and leading to ever longer wait lists. This article will argue that inefficient supply of services is created by mental health providers being incentivized toward individual therapy. Group therapy offers a solution because it is a “triple E treatment”—efficient, effective, and equivalent to individual therapy in terms of outcomes (Burlingame & Strauss, 2021). Group interventions also address systemic racism and the needs of minorities who have been marginalized and cope with minority stress. This article will utilize a labor and financial impact analysis to demonstrate how increasing group therapy by 10% nationally, particularly in private practice and primary care integration settings, would increase treatment access for over 3.5 million people while reducing the need for 34,473 additional new therapists and simultaneously saving over $5.6 billion. It will discuss how incentivizing groups while holding therapists accountable for training, competency when working with people from diverse backgrounds, and outcomes can result in improved efficiency. This will allow therapists greater freedom to collaboratively select the most effective treatments for those from underserved and minority backgrounds and create easier access to quality treatments.