Access to justice
Can ODR deliver better access to justice?
Professor Richard Susskind OBE is well known within the legal profession for his numerous books predicting a dramatic transformation in legal practice, and calling for an overhaul of 21st century lawyering. In February 2015 he made national headlines for his proposed eBay-style scheme for online dispute resolution (ODR) and the recommendation that HMCTS introduce a […]
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Transparency: promoting public understanding of the law
Law is a complicated subject and its effect on people’s lives can be hard to explain. But in certain areas the traditional media, particularly at the tabloid end of the spectrum, are notoriously prone to bias and misrepresentation. Three areas of law where this is particularly noticeable are family, crime and human rights. In all […]
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Custodians and gatekeepers: maintaining access to public legal information
Most people would now agree that public information should not only be publicly available, but also freely available. In the area of law, this is assumed to include not only legislation but also case law. This is, after all, the law of the land, ignorance of which is considered no defence. It is probably impossible […]
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Access to justice through technology
Richard Miller, Head of Legal Aid at The Law Society, said of our Access to Justice Campaign, launched in September 2104, “I am very keen that [it should] include guidance to our members about what they can do to make services more affordable to clients; and that, of course, includes how they can use technology […]
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The Big Advice Survey
The Big Advice Survey is a collaborative project, created and promoted by individual Citizens Advice Bureaux and Law Centres and an incredibly diverse range of other organisations. It went live on 1 December 2014 and will run until the end of March 2015. It is the largest UK-wide front-line service collaboration for many years. Support […]
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Justice online
Justice.gov.uk is on borrowed time. The intention is to move all information on that site and many other justice system websites to GOV.UK. Justice.gov.uk and those other websites will ultimately disappear. Much has moved already. As such, it is important to get to grips with GOV.UK. This article describes its structure and features with reference […]
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Justice on the move
Content has recently started migrating away from the Justice website. We’d just got used to the new Justice portal when GOV.UK came along promising to be the new single domain for government information (see the March issue). A new home on GOV.UK According to the Justice home page, “Ministry of Justice corporate content has moved […]
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Access to judgments
On 20 November 2012 Lord Neuberger, President of the Supreme Court, delivered the First Annual BAILII Lecture, entitled “No Judgment – No Justice” in which he dealt with three important aspects of improving access to justice through improved access to judgments: their clarity, free dissemination and enhancement. His intro para is worth quoting here in […]
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The Justice website
The Justice site was launched in April 2011 as the government’s attempt to bring together all websites related to the UK justice system for the professional user. Initially it was a rather desperate attempt to patch together lots of different sites, all with different underlying architectures and different views of what they were trying to […]
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Justice wide open
The principle of open justice has been robustly developed in English law since the mid-17th century, but the courts service in England and Wales has yet to fully utilise online technology for the dissemination of courts information and legal knowledge. The UK Supreme Court, which opened its doors to the public in 2009, leads the […]
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