Abstract
Legal aid, particularly in criminal justice, is a divisive subject. For its most devoted proponents, state funding of legal representation and advice for those accused of crime is a vital public good which helps to uphold values of fairness, justice and equality. For its most virulent critics, criminal legal aid is a wasteful, bloated relic from a bygone era of state intervention, serving primarily to help criminals escape justice. These are perhaps caricatures; but most opinions on criminal legal aid lie nearer to one or other extreme. This chapter examines how, like many areas of criminal justice, criminal legal aid has been subjected to (relatively) modern notions of marketisation, managerialism and competition. We aim to provide some critique of this by both exploring its development and briefly examining two ‘case studies’, which arguably demonstrate the impact of neo-liberal ideology on criminal legal aid.
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