"Access to Justice" — Noble Aspiration or a Load of Meaningless Tosh?
The Guardian published a thought-provoking article asking what people really mean by “access to justice” in light of the proposed 60% budget cut for the U.K.’s publicly funded law.
The author, Job Robins, asks whether “access to justice” is a noble aspiration or a load of meaningless tosh. He went straight to leading lawyers, thinkers and campaigners for answers.
Ultimately, he found that the definition of access to justice has changed since the 1970s.
In the 1970s, [Italian jurist Mauro] Cappelletti directed a research project funded by the Ford Foundation on “access to justice in modern societies” and which led to a four-volume series (called, you guessed it, Access to Justice). Cappelletti once said: “The right of effective ‘access to justice’ has emerged with the new social rights. Indeed, it is of paramount importance … Effective access to justice can be seen as the most basic requirement, the most basic human right, of a system which purports to guarantee legal rights.”
However, James Sandbach, the social policy officer for Citizens Advice Bureau, told Robins that the “prevailing philosophy is one of self-help and personal responsibility” rather than representing low-income individuals through legal aid. This philosophy would help explain the types of legal aid reforms currently being proposed in the U.K.
The main theme Robins seems to have found among the responses he received is that although legal redress is of paramount importance, legal advice is never at the top of the public’s priorities. It’s only important when you’re already in trouble and your rights are in jeopardy.
Read the whole article here.
Interesting. Do we, in the U.S., have a more unified understanding of what we mean by “access to justice”? Thoughts?
