The Price of Justice, III
I previously discussed how high prices of legal services are an injustice on the part of the state. Here is my third reason for this: the high prices turn the state into a tool of injustice by other agents. Private individuals and organizations use the government's legal system to coerce, cheat, and intimidate each other.
Example: Donald Trump has been accused many times of stiffing his contractors. How could he get away with this? Say he hires you to do a job for $100,000. After you've done it, he offers to pay you $75,000. You can accept his offer or sue him. If you sue him, it'll probably cost you, let's say, $30,000 in legal fees. So you're better off taking the 75k. (See: http://fortune.com/2016/09/30/donald-trump-stiff-contractors/.) Of course, you have no other legal recourse -- if you try to take what he owes you by force or stealth, the government will arrest you.
Another example: Time magazine ran a story in 1991 criticizing the Church of Scientology very harshly, including accusing them of abusing the legal system to intimidate critics. In response, the Church sued Time and the author of the article. The case was ultimately dismissed, meaning the court decided that it lacked legal merit and should not be heard by a jury. But not before 10 years of litigation -- the Church's last appeal was rejected in 2001. The author of the article was also questioned for about 190 hours by Scientology lawyers. Time and the author were forced to go through this (I don't know how much money they had to spend, but I would say a lot) by the government -- because if they had not responded, or they had not hired lawyers to defend themselves, then the government would probably have taken a lot of money from them.
A third (type of) example: there is a type of litigation called securities class action lawsuits. In this type of lawsuit, you sue a company for some sort of alleged misconduct, perhaps failing to disclose some relevant information, which you claim caused shareholders to lose money. If a company's stock has suffered a drop, you may be able to claim that this is due to something that the company should have disclosed to investors before they bought shares, and that their failure to disclose the information caused some investors to lose money. For a large company, there might be hundreds of millions of dollars in losses that you can claim. If there is even a small chance that your suit might succeed, the company will likely settle. This will force the company to pay money to the allegedly harmed investors, which of course will just cause the company's stock to drop again, so it may seem pointless. But the lawyers who started the suit will get to pocket something between 10 and 30% of the amount.
The government has a near-monopoly on dispute resolution, but its system for resolving disputes is so incredibly expensive that it no longer matters who is actually in the right, even legally, since you can't afford to actually obtain the legally correct result (nevermind the morally correct result). The legal system is a weapon against the virtuous and vicious alike. Because the government has an obligation not to be a tool of injustice by other agents, it has an obligation to make the legal system less expensive.