|
Showing 1 - 4 of
4 matches in All Departments
This book considers how access to justice is affected by
restrictions to legal aid budgets and increasingly prescriptive
service guidelines. As common law jurisdictions, England and Wales
and Australia, share similar ideals, policies and practices, but
they differ in aspects of their legal and political culture, in the
nature of the communities they serve and in their approaches to
providing access to justice. These jurisdictions thus provide us
with different perspectives on what constitutes justice and how we
might seek to overcome the burgeoning crisis in unmet legal need.
The book fills an important gap in existing scholarship as the
first to bring together new empirical and theoretical knowledge
examining different responses to legal aid crises both in the
domestic and comparative contexts, across criminal, civil and
family law. It achieves this by examining the broader social,
political, legal, health and welfare impacts of legal aid cuts and
prescriptive service guidelines. Across both jurisdictions, this
work suggests that it is the most vulnerable groups who lose out in
the way the law now operates in the twenty-first century. This book
is essential reading for academics, students, practitioners and
policymakers interested in criminal and civil justice, access to
justice, the provision of legal assistance and legal aid.
This book considers how access to justice is affected by
restrictions to legal aid budgets and increasingly prescriptive
service guidelines. As common law jurisdictions, England and Wales
and Australia, share similar ideals, policies and practices, but
they differ in aspects of their legal and political culture, in the
nature of the communities they serve and in their approaches to
providing access to justice. These jurisdictions thus provide us
with different perspectives on what constitutes justice and how we
might seek to overcome the burgeoning crisis in unmet legal need.
The book fills an important gap in existing scholarship as the
first to bring together new empirical and theoretical knowledge
examining different responses to legal aid crises both in the
domestic and comparative contexts, across criminal, civil and
family law. It achieves this by examining the broader social,
political, legal, health and welfare impacts of legal aid cuts and
prescriptive service guidelines. Across both jurisdictions, this
work suggests that it is the most vulnerable groups who lose out in
the way the law now operates in the twenty-first century. This book
is essential reading for academics, students, practitioners and
policymakers interested in criminal and civil justice, access to
justice, the provision of legal assistance and legal aid.
Basing much of its analysis upon the first systematic empirical
study of the French pre-trial process, this monograph breaks new
ground in the field of comparative criminal justice. Moving away
from idealised accounts of judicially supervised investigations, it
provides a better understanding of the ways in which an
inquisitorially rooted criminal process operates in practice and
the factors that influence and constrain its development and
functioning. The structure and operation of French criminal justice
is set within a broad range of contexts of political, occupational
and legal cultures from the French Republican tradition of
state-centred models of authority, across the growing influence of
the ECHR, to the local conditions which determine the ways in which
individual discretion is exercised. The French model of
investigative supervision and accountability is contrasted with
more adversarial procedures and in particular, the different ways
in which the reliability of evidence is guaranteed and the
interests of the accused protected. Systematic observation of the
daily working practices of police, gendarmes, prosecutors and juges
dinstruction across a number of sites and time periods, provides a
unique and detailed account of the ways in which the French
criminal process operates in practice. The understandings and
insights generated from this data are then set within a wider legal
and political analysis, which considers issues such as the
influence and interference of the State within matters of justice;
a comparative analysis of the judicial and defence functions; and
the extent to which ECHR fair trial guarantees are able to produce
legal and ideological change within a process which depends upon a
central and judicially supervised investigating authority. An
informed knowledge of other European criminal procedures is
increasingly essential for those working within UK (as well as
comparative) criminal justice, if there is to be a proper
engagement with, and evaluation of, measures such as the EUs
proposed Council Framework Decision on Certain Procedural Rights in
Criminal Proceedings throughout the European Union, as well as
recent legislative reform in England and Wales that seeks to adjust
the pre-trial roles of police and prosecutor in significant ways.
This book will be essential reading for teachers, researchers,
students and policy-makers working in the areas of criminal justice
in the UK and across Europe, in comparative criminal
justice/criminology, as well as in French and European studies.
Criminal cases are commonly seen as a fight between adversaries of
equal strength: the intrusive power of the State versus skilled
defence lawyers advocating their clients' cause. The reality,
according to this major new study, is rather different. The
provision of defence counsel is often rudimentary and
unsatisfactory. Based upon one of the largest studies of legal
professional practice ever undertaken, involving nearly fifty
solicitors' firms, this book offers a critical examination of the
practices and organisation of defence lawyers in Britain from the
moment of initial contact with clients through to the routine
preparation and representation of defendants in both Magistrates'
and Crown Courts, the authors show how defence lawyers discharge
their obligations to clients. For the first time, this study
reveals the role of paralegals and unqualified staff in providing
defence assistance, and highlights how their inexperience and
assumption of their client's guilt can critically undermine
defendants' rights. The deficiencies highlighted by their research
leads the authors to question the effectiveness of recent liberal
and managerial reforms, with their excessive reliance on market-led
considerations. The authors propose a cultural transformation in
criminal defence work, a reassertion of the defendants' rights
within an adversarial system, and offer constructive suggestions
for improving defence services. Extensively researched and
documented, this study is a major contribution to current debates
about the criminal justice system, and as such will be required
reading for all lawyers, scholars and professionals interested in
the administration of justice.
|
You may like...
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
|