Tag: Legal Aid
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Josie Welsh: The Power of a (Lord) Chief Justice
From 1 October 2023, England and Wales will have its first female Lord Chief Justice (‘LCJ’), with the recent news that His Majesty The King was ‘pleased to approve’ Dame Sue Carr’s appointment to the office. Her appointment follows the announcement of the retirement of current Lord Chief Justice The Rt Hon. Lord Burnett at the end of September.…
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Vicky Kapogianni: Clause 45 of the Nationality and Borders Bill: A Quasi-Open Window of Access to Justice
Access to justice is a fundamental right in the common law and an essential part of the rule of law. In R v Lord Chancellor Ex Parte Witham, Laws J stated that the common law affords special weight to the right of access to the courts as a constitutional right. Such a constitutional right derives chiefly from…
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Alex Schymyck: Why the proposed changes to asylum legal aid fees are unlawful
This blog analyses the legality of the Civil Legal Aid (Remuneration) (Amendment) (Coronavirus) Regulations 2020, which came into force on 8 June 2020 The regulations radically alter the renumeration available to lawyers who represent asylum seekers in appeals from decisions refusing to grant refugee status. They threaten the viability of legal aid provision and 66…
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Tom Hickman: Public Law’s Disgrace: Part 2
The cost of Access to Justice as a Constitutional Issue The issue of access to justice, and specifically the cost of litigation as a bar to accessing justice, is rightly becoming a major constitutional issue in the UK. In an address to the Australian Bar Association on 3 July 2017, Lord Neuberger, outgoing President of…
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Adrian Zuckerman: The Law’s Disgrace
In the article by Tom Hickman, “Public Law’s Disgrace”, Hickman laments the fact that the “vast majority of the population have no access to judicial review in any meaningful sense.” He goes on to say that this “is because of the rule, derived from private law, that if a claim is lost the claimant must…
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Tom Hickman: Public Law’s Disgrace
What is the most important issue in public law? You might be forgiven for thinking it is the gradation of principles of substantive review, or the proper limits of judicial interventionism, or even the scope of residual prerogative powers. But you would be wrong. There is a much, much graver and more urgent issue in…
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Ruchi Parekh: Delivering Justice in an Age of Austerity: A JUSTICE Working Party sets out its vision for change
Our justice system is in crisis. Ongoing state retrenchment has involved significant cuts to legal aid, the HMCTS budget and the publicly subsidised advice sector. The result is a growing justice gap, with legal advice and representation priced out of reach for most people. As a result, a greater number of people are being forced…
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Natasha Simonsen:Government cannot use a ‘statutory back door’ to implement major changes to legal aid services, Divisional Court says
In a judgment released yesterday a Divisional Court unanimously struck down the government’s attempt to introduce a residence test for eligibility for legal aid, finding it incompatible with the objective of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act (‘LASPO’). The ratio of the judgment was that the residence test had been introduced via…
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Dawn Oliver: Does treating the system of justice as a public service have implications for the rule of law and judicial independence?
If you asked a second year LLB student, or even a professor of public law or a legal practitioner, ‘what are the most fundamental functions of judges and the system of justice?’ you would probably get ‘doing justice to all without fear or favour’ and ‘upholding the rule of law’ among the most common answers.…
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Richard Cornes: 11-1 gender ratio Court’s Achilles Heel: Reporting of the Supreme Court’s start of the year press briefing
A relationship of cooperation but also competing interests On October 2 at 10am, the United Kingdom Supreme Court held an hour long pre-term press-briefing to mark the opening of the Court’s fifth year. This blog looks not only at what was said by the Court, and asked by the journalists on the day, but also…