Abstract
Public knowledge of rights has been the subject of a number of empirical enquiries over the last decade. In England and Wales, knowledge of rights and its relationship with an individual's capacity to ‘self-help’ and ‘self-represent’ when faced with a civil justice problem has become the subject of renewed attention following changes to legal aid which, from March 2013, will see the availability of legal advice and representation dramatically reduced. Previous studies focusing on public knowledge of rights in this (and other) jurisdictions have illustrated a lack of knowledge amongst the general population and more specifically, a widespread tendency of individuals to assume that the law aligns with their own moral, ethical or social attitudes. However, many of these studies have also suffered from methodological shortcomings. In attempting to address some of these shortcomings this study uses an open-ended format to ask individuals with one or one or more civil or social justice problems to describe their rights/legal position. We find that whilst an open-ended question approach to exploring knowledge of rights yields insight not acquired by other formats, its utility is constrained by difficulty reconciling articulation and actual knowledge of rights. We discuss the implications of these findings as they relate to the development of future research in the field of family and social welfare law, Public Legal Education (PLE) and access to justice post-March 2013.
Highlights
In 2010 the British Government proposed wide-ranging reforms to the legal aid system in England and Wales (Ministry of Justice 2011)
Deciding which areas of law would and would not qualify for publicly funded legal advice and assistance under the new legal aid scheme was justified in part, by reference to whether the public could utilise self-representation for their particular problem (Ministry of Justice 2010a, 2010b, 2011)
The reforms heralded by the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act (LASPO) 2012, detailed that self-help/self-representation would from April 2013 onwards, become a key route to resolving civil justice problems
Summary
In 2010 the British Government proposed wide-ranging reforms to the legal aid system in England and Wales (Ministry of Justice 2011). They noted that ‘successive changes (had) managed to contain the growth in overall spending on legal aid, such changes (had) not addressed the underlying problems facing the scheme’ Deciding which areas of law would and would not qualify for publicly funded legal advice and assistance under the new legal aid scheme was justified in part, by reference to whether the public could utilise (self-help and) self-representation for their particular problem (Ministry of Justice 2010a, 2010b, 2011).. A lack of knowledge has been said to potentially generate unrealistic expectations of lawyers and judges (Bowal 1999) and the risk of experiencing a civil justice problem (Williams 2009) and is further linked with the adoption of poor problem handling techniques and lower levels of satisfaction with outcome when an individual seeks to handle their problem alone (Buck et al, 2008, Balmer et al, 2010, Denvir et al, 2012)
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