The peasant, being at once poor, ignorant and often illiterate, lived far from the towns where justice was administerated.
Thus, he had little hope of obtaining justice that would be both equitable and inexpensive. The ordinary legal problems of the peasant concerned first of all his plot of land and then perhaps the few differences he might have with other farmers concerning the fields, water, animals or instruments used in his work.

In order to settle this questions, the peasant had to file a complaint to a lawyer, and then to travel one or more times to the inferior court, the summoning procedure also required an appearance at the prefecture, a process of appeal, and a journey to Tehran where the court was located.
A nother problem, was that the peasant were not in the habit of solving their differences by legal means, sometimes they took to violence.

So, if the peasants did`nt wanted to go to the law; instead, the law would go to the peasants, and to his own village. A local villager could better understand and solve the problems of another villager.

The first house of equity (A court of village justice were the judges were elected by the villagers every three years) was installed on an experimental basis in December 1963 in the village of Mehia near Isfahan.
It was followed by a hundred others and institutionalized by the the Ninth principle of the White Revolution, in October 1965.
At the end of 1977, there were 10 358 houses serving 19 000 villages, with a total population of more then 10 million.

The house of equity settled in 1965, 18 000 cases to the satisfaction of everyone.
The statistics, which stop at the end of 1977, indicate taht 3 million differences had been resolved.
If these cases had been adjudicated through the established judicary, it would take years after years to settle them and more costly.
In the view of numerous legal experts, the decisions of these common magistrates in the house of equity were always well reasond, just and logical.