Patricia Pearl has been a solicitor in practice and latterly a Judge in a busy county court until elevation. She is used to hearing actions across the full spectrum of work, including consumer law, debt collection, road traffic and cases related to personal injury, employment and landlord and tenant. Andrew Goodman is a barrister in practice. Their book is practical and authoritative, its contents including: . Financial limits, cases excluded and choice of county court . Commencing proceedings, defending proceedings and the pre-arbitration hearing . Preparations for the hearing, lay representatives . The hearing: practice, evidence and presentation issues . Mediation . Challenging the result . Precedents . Enforcement . Fees and terms.

This collection of wide-ranging and powerful essays brings together policy makers at the highest level, campaigners for prison reform, chaplains and those working in prison charities. The contributors include the Lord Chief Justice, Sir David Ramsbotham, Baroness Helena Kennedy and many others. The question 'What is prison for?' lies at the heart of The Future of Criminal Justice. Should it be for punishing or rehabilitating the offender? Should it provde restoration and closure for both offender and victim? As well as answering these questions, the contributors explore how religious faith can make a difference to people's lives, whether in the prison ministry of chaplains, in the reconciliation between an offender and the victim, or in the vision for a fairer and better criminal justice system. With prisons and crime currently a focus of politics, The Future of Criminal Justice is a timely and invaluable contribution to the criminal justice debate.

A man slips on the dancefloor and breaks his leg - he recovers damages. A child has both legs amputated as a result of meningitis, and is awarded nothing. The law's justification for awarding damages in the first case is that the man's injury was the fault of someone else, while in the second case damages are denied because nobody was at fault. This critique of the present law and practice relating to damages, shows that the damages system is in fact a lottery. It contends that the public are paying far too much for an unfair and inefficient insurance system, and that reform is long overdue. The book concludes that actions for damages for injuries should be abolished and replaced with a new no-fault road accident scheme, and actions for injuries should be dealt with by individual or group insurance policies.