Access to Justice

Building on a series of ESRC funded seminars, this edited collection of expert papers by academics and practitioners is concerned with access to civil and administrative justice in constitutional democracies, where, for the past decade governments have reassessed their priorities for funding legal services: embracing ‘new technologies’ that reconfigure the delivery and very concept of legal services; cutting legal aid budgets; and introducing putative cost-cutting measures for the administration of courts, tribunals and established systems for the delivery of legal advice and assistance. Without underplaying the future potential of technological innovation, or the need for a fair and rational system for the prioritisation and funding of legal services, the book questions whether the absolutist approach to the dictates of austerity and the promise of new technologies that have driven the Coalition Government's policy, can be squared with obligations to protect the fundamental right of access to justice, in the unwritten constitution of the United Kingdom.

Running parallel to the steady erosion, at least in England and Wales, of what we had come, perhaps complacently, to regard as an entrenched human right, the seminar series on which this book is based looked carefully and realistically at both sides of the issue: the shrinking availability of public funds and the practical possibilities of doing more with less. The volume seeks in particular to distinguish between those inroads into access to justice which are unacceptable on any principled view and those which are either unavoidable or at least negotiable. Wherever possible it does so, in contrast sometimes to central government, from an ascertained evidence base.

Ellie Palmer is an Emeritus Professor of Law and Tom Cornford, Yseult Marique and Audrey Guinchard are Senior Lecturers in Law, all at the University of Essex.