Unequal before the law? The future of legal aid
Edited by Jon Robins, journalist and director of Jures, Unequal before the law? examines the findings of the Commission of Inquiry into Legal Aid: a unique event that took place last February where a group of non-lawyers explored what kind of safety net our system of publicly funded law provides for poor and vulnerable clients.
This book specifically publishes the findings of the three panelists, nonpartisan and independent-minded experts who all have a long track record of promoting social justice, yet (by their own account), relative strangers to the specifics of legal aid. It also collects the testimony they considered - both ‘for’ and ‘against’ changes to legal aid – during the course of the evening.
The event made a powerful point. Access to justice is not just about legal aid, nor is about access to the courts and a competent lawyer. It is a much broader concept. It encompasses a recognition that central to any notion of a decent
Unequal before the law? serves as a useful introduction for people wishing to find out more about the role that legal aid plays in our society.
'The Justice Gap refers to the increasing section of the public too poor to afford a lawyer and not poor enough to qualify for legal aid. At the heart of any notion of a decent society is not only that we have the rights and priotections under the law but that we can enforce those rights and rely upon those protections if needed.
To that end, the Attlee government introduced our system of legal aid in 1949 as a fundamental building block of the welfare state. The architects of that welfare state decreed that legal aid shouldn't be restricted to those people 'normally classed as poor' but should also include those of 'small or moderate means'.
Something has gone wrong. That scheme is in danger of being reduced to a minority sink service. Elligibility for legal aid dropped from 80 per cent of the population in Attlee's day to less than one in three of us.
This publication is part of a series co produced by Jures and Solicitors Journal about closing the justice gap.'
- Michael Mansfield QC