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A Critical Analysis and Suggested Reform of Sentencing and Disqualification Orders under the Animal Welfare Act 2006
Get PDFIndia’s Law School Legal Aid Clinics: The Gaps Between Aspiration and Practice
Get PDFThe law schools legal aid activities conducted through its clinics has come a long way in India especially since its inception in the early 1970’s. Its evolution has been gradual, intermittent and varied. Although The Bar Council of India (BCI) has mandated, establishing legal aid clinics as a pre-requisite for granting the necessary permissions before law schools start functioning, there are limited ideas of its purpose and objectives. An inherent lack of understanding its importance in terms of teaching, learning and research, the legal aid practices are largely left to the discretion of the individual law schools and interpretations of the individual faculty members. Combined with ideas heavily borrowed from the law schools in the US and individual experiences of the faculty members, legal aid practices in India are diversified. In the backdrop of this, the author intends to explore and map the aspiration of legal aid through an analysis of the key policy documents of legal education since India’s independence through an ontological framework. The ontology maps the aspirations of the legal aid clinics that was intended through these documents. Additionally, a case study of two important institutions have been taken as the case in point in order to verify whether the practices match such aspirations. Thereby, putting forth arguments that are critical for understanding the gaps between the aspiration and the state of reality.
Key words: Legal aid Clinics, Law schools, Clinical, Legal education, Social justic
For the Greater Good: Sacrificial Violence and the Coronavirus Pandemic
Get PDFThe Covid-19 pandemic has ushered in an unprecedented epoch of myriad sacrifice. Unseen since World War Two, restrictions have been placed upon our movement at various degrees of intensity since March 2020. Across the world, citizenries have been informed by states to transiently sacrifice their cultural freedoms to protect the sacred – namely, healthcare systems and thereby help to preserve life, particularly the elderly. However, so far, little scholarly attention has been awarded to the presence of sacrifice throughout the pandemic. Therefore, this article is structured into four core themes. Whilst the first section outlines the moral and ethical quandaries generated by the Covid-19 pandemic, the second section explores the theoretical work on violence, since contemporary sacrifice is intimately connected to the systemic violence inherent in neoliberal capitalist economies. Next, the paper explicates the role of sacrifice during the pandemic, particularly through the sacrifices made by ‘key workers’ like care workers and nurses, outlining how neoliberalism’s systemic violence meant they were met with tokenistic gestures including clapping rather than a fundamental improvement in their working conditions. As sacrifice has historically served to reinforce the social fabric, the article closes with a discussion on whether sacrifice during the pandemic is likely to achieve this, given neoliberalism’s primacy to post-social arrangements including radical individualism, emotivism, and competition
Falling at the First Hurdle? A Critical Analysis of HMCTS’s Implementation of Stage 1 of the Online Court
Get PDFThis article critically examines the progress which has been made to date by HMCTS in implementing Stage 1 of the Online Court. Initially proposed by Lord Briggs as part of the Civil Court Structure Review, Stage 1 was intended to act as a virtual triage system for low value and non-complex civil claims. Its premise was based around a court user completing a series of ‘decision tree’ questions, which would in turn allow the system to provide them with information about the relevant legal framework relating to their dispute and allow them to create a properly pleaded claim or defence for submission to court. This would all be done without the need for legal representation. This article discusses the role Stage 1 is designed to play within the Online Court and the historical policy factors which have combined to render the successful implementation of Stage 1 so critical to the future of access to civil justice and the public trust in accessibility of civil justice. It questions the progress HMCTS have made to date on its design and for comparative purposes discusses the stages involved in the development of the Solutions Explorer within the Civil Resolution Tribunal in British Columbia on which Stage 1 of the Online Court is heavily based. The article concludes by offering recommendations to HMCTS on how the design, development and implementation of Stage 1 can still be achieved successfully
Book Review Briggs, D. (2021) Climate Changed: Refugee Border Stories and the Business of Misery. Routledge. ISBN 9878-0-367-43673-5
Get PDFLaw Schools as Legal Aid Providers in Kenya: Challenges and Lessons Learnt from Practice
Get PDFLegal aid is the provision of free or subsidized legal services to mainly poor and vulnerable people who cannot afford advocate fees. The right to legal aid is well rooted in the international, regional human rights treaty framework to which Kenya party. The provision of legal aid addresses the concerns of the poor and vulnerable by focusing on challenges that foil access to justice. In recognition of this, the Government of Kenya promulgated the Legal Aid Act, 2016 establishing the National Legal Aid Service to provide legal aid services to needy, marginalized, and vulnerable persons. This was a very important move, propelling the Government to prioritize legal aid provision as a right as well as a necessity for promotion of rule of law and access to justice. However, it is imperative to understand that the duty does not squarely fall on the State alone. There is need for non-state actors’ support from private entities like law firms, NGOs, Law schools and any other qualified legal personnel. Without a doubt, several non-state actors are actively offering free or subsidized legal aid and the purpose of this paper is to look at the lessons faced by a non-state actor from the experience of the authors organizing and running events to offer free legal aid. This includes expounding on challenges faced such as constrained funding, language barrier, illiteracy, and ignorance of legal rights. The punchline here is that there is room for all stakeholder to come together and forge a way forward for an improved legal aid framework in Kenya.
Keywords: Law schools, Legal aid clinics, Legal aid, Free legal services, Kenya, access to justice, rule of law
The fight to remain compliant: Public sentiment, pandemic and policing the second 2020 Victorian lockdown
Get PDFBefore 2020, the idea that an entire country would grind to a halt with businesses closed and freedom of movement curtailed at a moment’s notice would have seemed a fantasy, but the COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally altered the way the public experiences control in a lockdown setting. While lockdowns have occurred around the world, one of the more strict example of this policy occurred in Melbourne, Australia, where a 112-day shutdown lasted from July to October 2020. Such an extensive lockdown begs the question of how compliance with such restrictions over a lengthy period of time is maintained. This article offers a sentiment analysis of online discourse on the Facebook pages of four Melbourne news sources (The Age, 7 News Melbourne, 9 News Melbourne and NewsTalk 3AW) at key points during the second lockdown, to assess attitudes toward compliance (or, importantly, non-compliant behaviours). It shows that, despite media coverage suggestion resistance, the general public largely remained supportive of restrictive lockdown measures throughout the crisis, indicating that it is possible to achieve compliance from the majority of the public in strictly enforced lockdowns, despite the intervention of small-but-enthusiastic sets of anti-lockdown activists
Improving Access To Justice Through Legal Aid: Exploring The Possibilities Of ‘Exceptional Case Funding’ Clinics In University Law Schools
Get PDFThis article focuses on the role of universities in establishing law clinics to assist individuals to make Exceptional Case Funding (ECF) applications. The Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (LASPO) removed many categories of civil matters from the scope of legal aid, reducing the number of people entitled to state-funded legal advice and assistance. To replace provision for the categories removed from scope, LASPO introduced ECF to provide a ‘safety net’ for cases where human rights would be breached if legal assistance was not available. To obtain legal aid through the ECF scheme, legal aid providers or individuals must apply to the Legal Aid Agency, the department of government within the Ministry of Justice that deals with the administration of legal aid. The article considers how analysis of ECF clinics can contribute to knowledge about the work of universities in facilitating access to justice through clinical legal education, particularly in the context of cuts to legal aid expenditure. It argues that ECF clinics present an opportunity to involve students while engaging — rather than replacing — the responsibility of the British state to provide legal aid
State of the Reform of Legal Capacity in Chile
Get PDFThe Chilean legal regulation of disability has advanced towards an adequate legal framework for the progressive development of state practices respectful of the rights of people with disabilities. The ratification of the CRPD (2008) has been followed by an increasing amount of legislation directed to the inclusion of people with disabilities. The most important of this new disability regulation is the Law 20422 [on equal opportunities and social inclusion of people with disability]. Chile, in this way, can be regarded as a slow but persistent student of the teachings of the CRPD. Despite these positive developments, certain obligations under the CRPD are still pending, especially clear in the legal regulation affecting mental disability. The controversies surrounding legal capacity and mental health law are probably the most important issues surrounding the hesitation to carry out a reform