Access to Justice and Legal Aid - by Asher Flynn & Jacqueline Hodgson (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

Access to Justice & Legal Aid presents important perspectives on the crisis in unmet legal need in England, Wales and Australia, and makes a compelling case that governments at all levels should reverse the decline in support for legal aid and address the unmet legal need forthrightly.
Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books

The book provides a sound introduction to the challenges of the Australian and UK legal aid sectors. Innovators will see within the essays opportunities for innovations to ameliorate the otherwise harsh consequences of systemic changes driven by funding cuts, rather than client needs.
Law Institute Journal

This book is a welcome contribution to the 'excellent but thin' body of literature examining access to justice in Australia, and its comparative perspective adds a level of depth to that understanding. Practitioners, researchers and policymakers will all take something from this collection.
Alternative Law Journal

About the Author

Asher Flynn is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology within the School of Social Sciences at Monash University.
Jacqueline Hodgson is Professor of Law and Director of the Criminal Justice Centre in the School of Law, University of Warwick.