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The neoliberal agenda initiated under the Thatcher government had a major impact on the legal profession in the U.K., by dismantling its protective practices, and by substantially reducing the legal aid budget as part of its assault on welfare expenditures. The legal profession saw this as derogation from its legitimacy in the eyes of public opinion, or erosion of its symbolic social capital, and responded by an increased focus on cause lawyering and by assuming a greater burden of pro bono work.

This chapter explores the connection in many countries of the world between the provision of legal aid services, including legal representation, advice and assistance, community legal education, and law reform activities, and the establishment of clinical programs. It outlines the development of modern legal aid schemes in the context of the access to justice movement of the 1960s and 1970s, details the relationship between early clinical programs and legal aid services, and analyzes different models for delivering legal services in a law school legal aid clinic. It also examines the transformative potential in legal aid-based clinical legal education programs relative to their two constituencies: the communities they serve and the students they teach. The chapter concludes that redressing injustice and furthering equality before the law must remain a consistent theme and overwhelming concern in legal aid clinics around the world.

The classic professions — law and medicine — presented themselves as honoratiores, indifferent to material reward. Clients and patients were lucky to get their services. The rapid accumulation of capital and growth of the bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century stimulated demand for the emergent modern legal professions. By the 1980s, however, these comfortable arrangements were unravelling. The expansion of academic legal education dramatically increased the number of law graduates. The extraordinary increase in divorces from 38,000 in 1951 to 176,000 in 1981 explained much of the jump in civil legal aid certificates from 38,000 to 270,000. Between 1970 and 1983, the civil legal aid budget grew tenfold and the criminal more than twentyfold. Legal aid transformed the relationship between lawyers and clients from a neo-classical market in which no consumer could influence price or quality to something more monopsonistic.

Labour had equivocated on legal aid. As shadow Home Secretary, Tony Blair declared that any attempt to slash the legal aid budget would be disastrous for the legal system and for the many ordinary citizens. Lord Irvine told 500 solicitors that Lord Mackay's 1995 Green Paper had the fingerprints of the treasury all over it but conceded Labour had no quick fixes and no new money. Anticipating the 1997 general election, Irvine promised at the September 1996 annual Bar conference to restore legal aid to the status of a public social service. Universal contributions were a ‘powerful deterrent’ to accepting legal aid. At the same time, Irvine did not rule out a budget cap, the hope was to have QCs' fees regulated. After the Labour landslide, the Solicitors Journal hoped the presence of seven lawyers in the Cabinet would be good news for the legal profession. Labour promised a less confrontational approach.

The chapter is a history of the Communist Party legal organization, which funded, administered, and publicized tens of thousands of political trials. Despite their professions of ideological discipline, harnessing the often volatile, headstrong and individualistic party lawyers to a coherent political strategy proved tricky. The Communist Party pioneered the standardization of legal aid and the propagandistic exploitation of trials by ingeniously combining both in one in-house law office. The highly innovative KPD party legal organization grew rapidly and enjoyed a high visibility both within the party and outside it. Matching lawyers and cases, it used legal aid to monitor trials and disseminate the party's message, discipline defendants, and build up selected cases into high-profile publicity campaigns. The celebrated trial and rehabilitation campaign of Max Hölz, the ‘Communist Robin Hood’, is the main case study.

This chapter covers clinical legal education in Southern, East, and West Africa. It includes a short history of law clinics in each region, as well as an analysis of why the law clinics were needed and a description the clinical programs' requirements and the types of training and evaluation used. In most African countries, university law clinics were established to provide legal services and access to justice for poor and marginalized communities, as well as to teach law students practical skills. As in the United States during the 1960s, the South African clinical movement in the 1970s was closely linked to access to justice and therefore “live client” clinics tend to be the norm. The chapter concludes that apart from educating law students in practical skills and social justice, law clinics can also play a crucial role in supplementing the paucity of legal aid services in most African countries.

This chapter discusses the development of clinical legal education in the People's Republic of China and the challenges it faces today. It describes China's legal, legal education, and legal aid systems, including their dramatic expansion since 1979 and the substantial political constraints on legal reform imposed by China's administrative-party state. It also offers a brief history of Chinese clinical legal education, including to the work of the Ford Foundation and China's leading national clinical organization, the Committee of Chinese Clinical Legal Educators (CCCLE), as well as an overview of current programs and descriptions of several universities' clinical programs. It presents examples of individual and group-representation labor rights cases, which are prominent in Chinese clinics. The chapter concludes by analyzing the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead, including future financing and better integration with both the legal academy and the legal profession—challenges that mirror those in other countries, including the United States.

It has long been accepted that nongovernmental organizations have taken over the role of the government in spheres of health and education in Africa. Using field research from Uganda, this chapter presents examples of NGOs that have been active in the enforcement of property rights where the state has chosen not to enforce certain rights or where it is not strong enough to do so. Ideologically motivated NGOs have acted to educate lawyers, judges, and citizens and, in some extreme cases, to equip and train police so as to enable the defense of legal rights to property. The implications of this new role for NGOs in terms of local and national authority are discussed. The evidence suggests a completely different model for understanding legal NGOs from that which has been previously suggested; they neither feed into the legal process nor exist completely separate from it, but are intertwined with the state in surprising ways.

This chapter is about the compensating mechanisms and how they work to further access to justice. It starts by reviewing how publicly funded legal services can be justified given the many other calls on the public purse. It then explores one of the various forms of public funding, traditional legal aid, sometimes called judicare, where public funding goes to pay private lawyers who take on clients largely as if they were fee-paying. It also describes the structures for public funding. The next parts of the chapter move away from public funding. It addresses whether it is possible to stimulate private provision of legal services to close some of the gaps in access to justice. Furthermore, it discusses alternative dispute mechanisms to deal with people's legal disputes. It is stated that there is a need for new ways of doing things which facilitate access to justice.

In austerity Britain, the contested policies that cut legal aid funding and court system financing threaten justice and the rule of law, the very core of the British judicial system, which is admired and respected worldwide. Thus, it is necessary to identify and to analyse critically policies that affect law and justice, the impacts of such policies and resistance to them. This chapter explores changes to legal aid and justice financing as well as reversals, government justifications for changes and the response of the judiciary and lawyers as a basis for its reflective narrative on the state of the judicial system. As a case study of the wider debate on austerity-through-policy in Britain, the chapter reviews recent legal aid reform and so-called ‘discount justice’ in England and Wales. Particular focus is given to the impact, or likely impact, austerity policies have on the availability of legal aid for criminal cases, and the uncertain future of public spending on justice.

Toynbee Hall is one of the great manifestations of Victorian philanthropy. In 1984, it celebrated the centenary of its foundation. Toynbee Hall was justly acclaimed as the pioneering and imaginative venture it was, a product of that serious, high-minded intelligent and practical concern for others which distinguished so many of the later Victorians. In 1998, it celebrated the centenary of its free Legal Advice Centre, originally called its Poor Man's Lawyer Service. This chapter looks at the history of legal assistance provided for those who cannot afford to pay the fees charged by private lawyers, and considers the proposals then current for reforming the legal aid system as it has existed since 1949. The Poor Man's Lawyer was not, it seems, the first of its kind in Britain. That accolade belongs to the Mansfield House Settlement in Canning Town. The rationale underlying these schemes was simple and very compelling.

There are firms of solicitors which evidently make a profitable business under the existing system of legal aid, by providing a service that is less reactive to police and court priorities, less discontinuous in the forms of representation provided, less ideologically oriented toward a stereotype of the criminal client as dishonest and untrustworthy, and less predisposed toward concluding cases through guilty pleas. The result over time has been to sharpen the division in practice between Crown Court and magistrates' court work and to reinforce another central feature of the criminal defence practice — the discontinuity of representation offered to the client. The rapid spread of representation in magistrates' courts has been linked to the purpose of solicitors in facilitating not only the general expansion of caseloads in these courts but also the introduction of specific court efficiency measures. Criminal defence and legal aid in general offer a converse ‘ideal type’ to the usual image of the bureaucratic and professionally dominated welfare state service, with its supposed (over) dependence on central planning and unified standards of service.

The right to legal assistance is a fundamental safeguard for a fair trial. There is no international legal standard as to how to deal with the waiver of legal representation. Nonetheless, the fact that the ICTY allowed alleged war criminals such as Milošević, Šešelj, and Karadžić to represent themselves has generated criticism. This chapter outlines the problems the ICTY has faced, and is still facing, in accommodating an accused's wish to conduct his or her own defence. For instance, should it allow the self-represented accused the assistance of legal advisors and provide legal aid to such accused? It scrutinizes the commendable efforts that the ICTY has made to uphold this right. But it also addresses the flaws in legal reasoning and inconsistencies, even within the course of a single case, that have accompanied the decisions of the ICTY allowing self-representation.

This chapter explores the development of access to advice on legal matters in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and its relationship to changes in the administration of both the criminal law and the Poor Laws. It outlines the development of social reform around ‘scientific’ approaches to welfare and charity, and the shift to rules-based systems from the more discretionary Poor Laws. It explores the establishment of a number of governmental committees from the interwar period to look at how the law could be made more accessible to the public, starting with access to divorce, and the different approaches of each to voluntarism, public funding of legal advice, professional and judicial independence. The chapter examines the impact of the partially-implemented Legal Aid and Advice Act 1949 in post-war Britain, and the shifts in lawyers’ and civil servants’ attitudes towards working-class advice-seekers.

It has long been recognised that unaccompanied child asylum seekers are a particularly vulnerable sub-section of an already vulnerable population. Yet despite this recognition, child asylum seekers coming to the UK face particular obstacles in making out their claims for asylum. This chapter explores recent developments in the UK’s approach to children seeking asylum. The chapter considers how despite well-written guidelines and public awareness of the specific protection needs of children from conflict zones, the asylum system has, in many cases, failed to provide durable solutions for child refugees. It considers the legal obstacles that young asylum seekers face, including assessments of credibility, the provision of legal aid, and delays in decision making.