Legal Aid In Crisis

Originally introduced as a form of social welfare with near-universal eligibility, legal aid in the UK is now framed as a benefit external to the legal system and understood in primarily economic terms. This book is the first to evaluate the recent reforms of UK legal aid from a social policy perspective and assess their impact on family law courts and advocacy. Written by experts in the field, it focuses on the rise in people representing their own legal case and argues that the reforms effectively ‘delawyerise’ disputes, producing a more inquisitorial justice system and impacting the litigants, court system, staff and process. Arguing for a more holistic concept of the reforms, the book will be of relevance to students, academics, policy-makers, judges, campaigners and social workers, not just in England and Wales, but in other jurisdictions instituting cuts to their legal aid budgets, such as Australia, Scotland, France, and the Netherlands.

This book is the first to evaluate the recent reforms of UK legal aid from a social policy perspective and assess their impact on family law courts and advocacy. It argues that the reforms effectively 'delawyerise' disputes, producing a more inquisitorial justice system and impacting the litigants, court system, staff and process.

Unfulfilled legal needs are at a tipping point in much of the Canadian justice system. The Justice Crisis assesses what is and isn’t working in efforts to strengthen a fundamental right of democratic citizenship: access to civil and family justice. Contributors to this wide-ranging overview of recent empirical research address key issues: the extent and cost of unmet legal needs; the role of public funding; connections between legal and social exclusion among vulnerable populations; the value of new legal pathways; the provision of justice services beyond the courts and lawyers; and the need for a culture change within the justice system.

Even though legal aid is available for people seeking asylum, there is uneven access to advice across Britain. Based on empirical research, this book offers fresh thinking on what has gone wrong in the legal aid market. It presents a rare picture of the barristers, solicitors and caseworkers practising immigration law in charities and private firms. In doing so, this book examines supply and demand and illuminates what constitutes high-quality legal aid work/provision, subsequent conflicts with financial rationality and how practitioners resolve these issues. Challenging existing legal aid policy, this book presents innovative insights to ensure public service markets around the globe function well for all those involved.

This book considers how access to justice is affected by restrictions to legal aid budgets and increasingly prescriptive service guidelines. As common law jurisdictions, England and Wales and Australia, share similar ideals, policies and practices, but they differ in aspects of their legal and political culture, in the nature of the communities they serve and in their approaches to providing access to justice. These jurisdictions thus provide us with different perspectives on what constitutes justice and how we might seek to overcome the burgeoning crisis in unmet legal need. The book fills an important gap in existing scholarship as the first to bring together new empirical and theoretical knowledge examining different responses to legal aid crises both in the domestic and comparative contexts, across criminal, civil and family law. It achieves this by examining the broader social, political, legal, health and welfare impacts of legal aid cuts and prescriptive service guidelines. Across both jurisdictions, this work suggests that it is the most vulnerable groups who lose out in the way the law now operates in the twenty-first century. This book is essential reading for academics, students, practitioners and policymakers interested in criminal and civil justice, access to justice, the provision of legal assistance and legal aid.

Access to justice and legal aid cuts : a mismatch of concepts in the contemporary Australian and British legal landscapes / Asher Flynn and Jacqueline Hodgson -- Challenges facing the Australian legal aid system / Mary Anne Noone -- Rhyme and reason in the uncertain development of legal aid in Australia / Jeff Giddings -- The rise and decline of criminal legal aid in England and Wales / Tom Smith and Ed Cape -- A view from the bench : a judicial perspective on legal representation, court excellence, and therapeutic jurisprudence / Pauline Spencer -- Face-to-interface communication : accessing justice by video link from prison / Carolyn McKay -- The rise of "DIY" law : implications for legal aid / Kathy Laster and Ryan Kornhauser -- Community lawyers, law reform, and systemic change : is the end in sight? / Liana Buchanan -- What if there is nowhere to get advice? / James Organ and Jennifer Sigafoos -- The end of "tea and sympathy" the changing role of voluntary advice services in enabling access to justice? / Samuel Kirwan -- Reasoning a human right to legal aid / Simon Rice Oam -- Cuts to civil legal aid and the identity crisis in lawyering : lessons from the experience of England and Wales / Natalie Byrom -- Access to what? Laspo and mediation / Rosemary Hunter, Anne Barlow, Janet Smithson, and Jan Ewing -- Insights into inequality : Victorian women's access to legal aid / Pasanna Mutha-Merennege -- Indigenous people and access to justice in civil and family law / Melanie Schwartz -- Austerity and justice in the age of migration / Ana Aliverti