This open access book provides a snapshot of the state of contemporary access to justice in England and Wales. Legal aid lawyers provide a critical function in supporting individuals to address a range of problems. These are problems that commonly intersect with issues of social justice, including crime, homelessness, domestic violence, family breakdown and educational exclusion. However, the past few decades have seen a clear retreat from the tenets of the welfare state, including, as part of this, the reduced availability of legal aid. This book examines the impact of austerity and related policies on those at the coalface of the legal profession. It documents the current state of the sector as well as the social and economic factors that make working in the legal aid profession more challenging than ever before. Through data collected via the Legal Aid Census 2021, the book is underpinned by the accounts of over 1000 current and former legal aid lawyers. These accounts offer a detailed demography and insight into the financial, cultural and other pressures forcing lawyers to give up publicly funded work. This book combines a mixture of quantitative and qualitative analysis, allowing readers a broad appreciation of trends in the legal aid profession. This book will equip readers with a thorough knowledge of legal aid lawyers in England and Wales, and aims to stimulate debate as to the fate of access to justice and legal aid in the future.

Over the last decade, cost pressures, technology, automation, globalisation, de-regulation, and changing client relationships have transformed the practice of law, but legal education has been slow to respond. Deciding what learning objectives a law degree ought to prioritise, and how to best strike the balance between vocational and academic training, are questions of growing importance for students, regulators, educators, and the legal profession. This collection provides a range of perspectives on the suite of skills required by the future lawyer and the various approaches to supporting their acquisition. Contributions report on a variety of curriculum initiatives, including role-play, gamification, virtual reality, project-based learning, design thinking, data analytics, clinical legal education, apprenticeships, experiential learning and regulatory reform, and in doing so, offer a vision of what modern legal education might look like.

Over the last decade, cost pressures, technology, automation, globalisation, de-regulation, and changing client relationships have transformed the practice of law, but legal education has been slow to respond. Deciding what learning objectives a law degree ought to prioritise, and how to best strike the balance between vocational and academic training, are questions of growing importance for students, regulators, educators, and the legal profession. This collection provides a range of perspectives on the suite of skills required by the future lawyer and the various approaches to supporting their acquisition. Contributions report on a variety of curriculum initiatives, including role-play, gamification, virtual reality, project-based learning, design thinking, data analytics, clinical legal education, apprenticeships, experiential learning and regulatory reform, and in doing so, offer a vision of what modern legal education might look like.

International law and most national legal systems recognize the right to strike as a fundamental human right. However, the most common qualification for a strike is that the action must first be approved by ballot. These types of requirements are often said to be necessary to protect the democratic rights of the workers - the so-called democratic imperative. But is that truly their aim? This book draws on detailed empirical study of the Australian legislative provisions for pre-strike ballots; a comparative analysis of law and practice in a range of countries including Canada, South Africa, the United States, and the United Kingdom; and the approaches of the supervisory bodies of the International Labour Organisation to evaluate the true purpose and effect of the ballot requirement. While in some cases the ballot requirement provided additional bargaining leverage for unions, overall, the study showed that the principle purpose of ballot requirements is to curtail strikes rather than vindicate the democratic imperative it claims to support. Exploring collective bargaining and union democracy, this is an essential title for those involved in or studying labour law. This book also demonstrates the fundamental shortcomings of ballot regimes, and provides and accessible exploration of the operation of said regimes, which makes this a helpful tool for unionists to understand their rights as workers. It also considers significant policy questions in the field and is relevant in the respect of the international labour law regime.