Changing Patterns of Legal Representation in Divorce: From Lawyers to Pro Se

Governmental assistance for legal representation in civil cases is far greater in the United Kingdom than in the United States of America. This article explores the extent of legal support for low–income Americans, particularly in the area of family law. Examination of the data on self–representation across the United States and over time shows decreased reliance on lawyers. Drawing on institutional and individual perspectives, the article then explores why individuals choose to represent themselves in divorce. What do lawyers add to a divorce besides cost? The article suggests patterns of lawyering depending upon the lawyer and the resources of the client. While some pro se individuals may thrive in the divorce process without the need of a lawyer, others are disadvantaged by the lack of services available to them. The matching process between case needs and legal representation does not work.     

Dispute Resolution Outside of Courts: Procedural Justice and Decision Acceptance Among Users of Ombuds Services in the UK

Attitudes toward legal authorities based on theories of procedural justice have been explored extensively in the criminal and civil justice systems. This has provided considerable empirical evidence concerning the importance of trust and legitimacy in generating cooperation, compliance, and decision acceptance. However, not enough attention has been paid to attitudes towards institutions of informal dispute resolution. This paper asks whether the theory of procedural justice applies to the alternative dispute resolution context, focusing on ombuds services. What are the predictors of perceptions of procedural justice during the process of dealing with an ombuds, and what factors shape outcome acceptance? These questions are analyzed using a sample of recent ombuds users. The results indicate that outcome favorability is highly correlated with perceived procedural justice, and both predict decision acceptance.     

"It's Darwinism – Survival of the Fittest:" How Markets and Reputations Shape the Ways in Which Plaintiffs' Lawyers Obtain Clients

The survival of a plaintiffs' lawyer's practice depends upon the generation of an ongoing flow of clients with injuries that the civil justice system will compensate adequately. If this requirement is not met, lawyers will leave this aspect of the legal market for more promising ones. If they do, legal services for injured people will be diminished as a result. In order to find out how this personal services legal market is defined and developed, we interviewed ninety‐five plaintiffs' lawyers in Texas. These lawyers use four major strategies to get clients: client referrals, lawyer referrals, direct marketing, and other referrals. What any particular lawyer does is shaped by the geographic market from which clients are drawn, and by the lawyer's reputation. Our findings provide fresh insights for the empirical literature on plaintiffs' lawyers, and they provide an empirical context for assessing the potential impact of changes in the civil justice system, like tort reform, on the ability of plaintiffs' lawyers to obtain clients.     

“Good moral characters”: how drug felons are impacted under state marijuana legalization laws

This article examines how drug felons will be impacted by marijuana legalization in the United States. What will happen to drug felons whose charges would be legal under current law? Can drug felons work in the newly developing legal marijuana industries? In this article we will overview the statistics on arrests and convictions with their high rates of racial disparities. The war on drugs has inspired the development of more repressive criminal justice tactics such as asset forfeiture, high rates of re-incarceration during parole for marijuana violations, drug courts and their further reach into lifestyles, and the difficulties of prisoner reentry, especially for drug felons, who are barred from many jobs and social services. We will look at the regulations of felony offenders working in the cannabis industry. And we will consider the outcomes of retroactive ameliorative relief for this case of marijuana possession felonies under legalization.     

The “Right Paper”: Developing Legal Literacy in a Legal Self‐Help Clinic

Legal self‐help is the fastest‐growing segment of legal services in the United States, and a significant addition to the repertoire of programs aimed at opening up access to justice in the civil legal system. Few studies, however, have examined how such services work in practice. Through ethnographic research and analysis of meetings between unrepresented litigants and attorneys offering advice in a legal self‐help clinic, this article expands the empirical investigation of access to justice to consider what legal self‐help looks like in actual practice. In this article, I follow the concept of the “right paper” to analyze the process through which legal self‐help litigants develop legal literacy, including the role of lawyers in helping them to do so. The article concludes by discussing what such practices reveal about recent efforts to open up access to justice and also about the dynamics through which people come to think about law and, especially, how to use it.     

Advancing justice interests and human rights of vulnerable groups through clinical legal education

Access to justice rights of vulnerable groups in the Maldives is significantly affected due to lack of information, awareness, accessibility, and legal representation. The provision of State-funded legal aid is only available in serious criminal cases, and free legal services provided by individual lawyers and civil society organisations are limited and scattered. Out of 20, only a handful of atolls in the Maldives have resident lawyers offering legal services. Thus, as a country with over 200 inhabited islands, key vulnerable groups such as women and children face serious challenges in attaining legal services and access to the system. This article emphasises the broader objectives of legal education and argues that by pursuing social justice goals and advancing the human rights of vulnerable groups in the Maldives, university law clinics can benefit legal education and the society at large.

     

The Role,Benefits, and Concerns of Digital Technology in the Family Justice System

Digitalization is increasing across family justice systems around the world. What are the benefits? What will be the impact on professional practice and legal representation? What are the concerns for those who may be digitally disadvantaged? How much can justice itself become digital?     

Above the Roof,Beneath the Law: Perceived Justice behind Disruptive Tactics of Migrant Wage Claimants in China

The way in which citizens in developing countries conceptualize legality is a critical but understudied question for legal consciousness and legal mobilization studies. Drawing on participatory observations and extensive interviews from western China, this article explores the subjective interpretations of migrant wage claimants on law and justice behind their disruptive actions. Their perception of justice differs starkly from what the law stipulates as target, evidence and proper procedures. Who shall be held responsible? What constitutes evidence? When shall they be paid? How much? Their perceptions also differ from the attitude “against the law” found among members from disadvantaged social groups in the United States. The Chinese case of legal perception is shaped by the moral precepts ingrained in the culture, and more importantly, by the lopsided relationship between migrant workers and the political and business elite. It thus points to the daunting barriers in channeling the ever‐growing number of social conflicts into court.     

Shaping the Structure of Legal Opportunities: Environmental NGOs Bringing International Environmental Procedural Rights Back Home

Research on legal opportunity structures has focused on how existing law, standing rules, and the costs of litigation shape the likelihood that social movement groups will mobilize the law. Yet there has been relatively little research on how and why legal opportunity structures change over time. This article focuses on a case study of the mobilization of procedural environmental rights contained within the Aarhus Convention. It addresses the following empirical puzzle: how did rights that were designed to help Eastern Europeans achieve environmental democracy eventually contribute to a reshaping of the structure of legal opportunities in Britain? Through a two‐step historical process‐tracing analysis that relies on a social constructivist theoretical approach, this research shows that environmental groups mobilized Aarhus rights in a number of ways and across different judicial venues, resulting in an evolution over time of the meaning of access to justice so that it included being “not prohibitively expensive.” This research builds on previous work to show that civil society agents are not passive agents situated within legal opportunity structures but instead are strategic actors who can develop and shape access to justice through policy entrepreneurialism and litigation.     

Service Providers’ Knowledge and Perceptions of the Legal Service Needs of Crime Victims

Currently, there is an expansive body of victimization literature within the criminal justice field, which covers a number of essential topics such as victimization trends and patterns, short-and long-term effects of victimization, as well as specific effects of intimate partner violence and sexual assault victimization. Despite the variety of topics examined by empirical research, there is a noticeable lack of discourse pertaining to civil legal services for crime victims. This study is among the first to take a close look at civil legal services for victims by exploring three uncharted areas including: (a) service providers’ knowledge of civil legal services, (b) the legal needs of crime victims and available services, and (c) barriers between victims and accessing civil legal services. Using quantitative and qualitative data from interviews with service providers, policy implications and future research recommendations are discussed.     

Access to justice: is legal services regulation blocking the path?

Abstract

High prices and lack of innovation have placed expert legal services beyond the reach of too many Americans and Canadians. Is legal services regulation exacerbating common law North America's access to justice problem? Does regulatory maintenance of a unified legal profession, and insulation of that profession from non-lawyer influence, make it more difficult for people here to meet their legal needs? This article argues that, although regulatory liberalization is not a magic bullet for the accessibility of justice, there is strong evidence of a link between regulation and access. North American lawyer regulators need to understand, and work to reduce, the effects of their policies on the accessibility of justice.     

Civil Cases and Society: Process and Order in the Civil Justice System

It is not an exaggeration to say that we live in an era preoccupied with the problems and challenges of obtaining justice in civil cases. Concerns expressed about the civil justice system range from warnings that civil court dockets are clogged by disputants too litigious for their own good to complaints that the legal system is used too rarely in civil cases.
The authors approach their analysis with a sense that this subject area is in need of more and better theory. It is an unfortunate fact that discussions of civil justice—and suggestions for reform—have been marked by contradiction and confusion and have been engrossed with small matters that tend to obscure from view the system as a whole.
The first part of this essay focuses on what the civil justice system is and does. It presents a five-stage model of civil case processing and examines relationships between this model and the criminal justice system. The second part of the essay considers this model in a broader context. Here the authors examine two paradigms of civil case processing and their implications for the implementation of legal norms and the pursuit of justice in society.     

Reducing Domestic Violence and Improving Outcomes for Children: Funding Civil Legal Aid to Maximize Impact

Domestic violence survivors and children in foster care often experience significant unmet civil legal needs. Legal aid services, when adequately funded, can help close the justice gap for these two populations while improving safety, stability, and court efficiencies. However, despite ample literature demonstrating how legal aid can improve outcomes, almost half of those seeking legal aid services are turned away due to lack of resources. This article reviews the research and data about how legal aid can improve outcomes for people in the domestic violence and child welfare contexts. It also discusses how several state‐administered federal funding opportunities—including the Victims of Crime Act (VOCA) Victim Assistance Formula Grant Program, Title IV‐D child support funds, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) basic block grants—can fund the needed civil legal help.     

Sexual orientation as a justice issue: Issues of postmodern social philosophy and religion for civil rights

This essay theoretically explores three core concerns for social justice research and analysis in the transition from social and legal philosophical foundations based upon Enlightenment categorical universals to a postmodern context that recognizes concurrent globalization and the constructed nature of particular status identities. Utilizing sexual orientation as a case study, the concerns are, what constitutes a civil right in a postmodern context, how useful are categories versus behaviors in protecting civil rights, and how does religion affect the civil morality that justifies and legitimates justice criteria? The argument is made that a justice construct for sexual orientation must rely both on behavioral freedoms and ontological status for adequate protection of human dignity and equality. It also is argued that interreligious discourse is essential to reparticularize religiomoral assumptions that have justified inequality and to provide an adequate negotiated grounding to legitimate shared norms upon which postmodern justice philosophy can be built.     

见义勇为立法与学说之反思——以《民法通则》第109条为中心

见义勇为可以被定义,其是自然人在履行法定职责或特定义务之外,为保护国家、公共的或他人的利益,而与各种违法犯罪作斗争、抢险救灾的正义之举.在民法属性上,见义勇为呈现出多样性,与无因管理、正当防卫、紧急避险有紧密联系.对于见义勇为者与受益人之间的法律关系,应适用无因管理之债的规定,适用《民法通则》第109条反而会造成背离实质正义的尴尬结局.因此,《民法通则》第109条等规范应予废除.     

Lawyers' Duty to Do Justice: A New Look at the History of the 1908 Canons

This article examines a long-forgotten controversy about lawyers' duties to evaluate the justice of their clients' causes in civil cases that took place among the members of the Committee of the American Bar Association (ABA) that drafted the 1908 Canons of Professional Responsibility. The article presents an analysis of newly discovered internal working documents of this important, but never before examined, ABA committee, supplemented with primary historical research into the views and backgrounds of the committee's members. The article demonstrates how a clash of perspectives among these men-traceable in part to their backgrounds but also to their unpredictable allegiances to conflicting trends in legal thought at the turn of the century-prevented the committee from reaching a satisfactory resolution on the duty's to-do-justice issue. The committee members instead adopted ineffectual compromise language in the Canons, leaving us with a legacy of concealed ambivalence on the question of lawyers' "duty to do justice" in civil cases.     

Adjudication of Islamic banking and finance cases in the civil courts of Malaysia

The adjudication of Islamic banking and finance (IBF) laws in Malaysia is unique given the Malaysian parallel legal systems. Although IBF is a branch of Islamic law, the civil court has the appropriate jurisdiction to decide the cases. This is due to the fact that banking falls under the items 7 and 8 of the Federal List of the Federal Constitution. The trails of decided cases showed that there are problems in resolving IBF cases in the civil courts. This paper aims to discuss the adjudication of Islamic Banking in the civil courts. The authors employed the method of legal documents analysis in analyzing the IBF cases. The analysis highlighted four obstacles in adjudicating IBF in civil courts, namely; inadequacy of existing legal framework, complications of legal documentation, competency of civil court judges and expert evidence. It also analysed the four approaches adopted by the civil courts in deciding IBF cases; the ‘parties to be bound by their agreement’, the ‘strict adherence to civil law’, the ‘justice and equitable’ and the ‘looking into the substance’.     

行人违章交通事故归责原则异议

行人与机动车驾驶者均要求有效率地使用道路,管理者也有同样的要求。法律应如何面对各方面的效率需求?何种效率才是法律本身所追求的价值?是否像有的学者所指责的“取效率而弃公平”?本文以法律经济学分析方法,分析认为该条例所牺牲的恰恰是社会效率。     

The Role of Culture in Legal Languages,Legal Interpretation and Legal Translation

The aim of this short essay is to highlight and concisely explore—but not address in depth—some cultural aspects related to legal languages, legal interpretation and legal translation. We would like to consider briefly the following questions: How can elements of legal language, as exemplified by proper names and euphemisms, be connected with cultural (extra-linguistic) factors influencing language units’ formation? How can judicial discourse reflect the culture of a given justice system? How can the legal interpretation affect the degree of legal culture? Are theories of legal interpretation universal or applicable to specific legal cultures? What is the impact of culture on the context of legal translation? How can the cultural background affect the decision to use terms in translation? How does cyberculture impact legal translation?

     

法证披露模型:应当向法证专家披露什么和法证专家应当披露什么?

法律上的披露问题主要集中在检控方向辩护方提供或者隐瞒了哪些证据。在本文中,我们将披露的概念扩展到更广泛的情境下,在这种情境下,披露失误可能导致误判。我们引入了一个概念模型,即“法证信息披露”,它涉及哪些信息应该披露给法证检验人员,以及法证检验人员应当披露哪些信息。本文全面概述了四类利益相关者的动态交互:法证服务、调查、法律和外部利益相关者。我们通过五个问题讨论了法证信息披露模式的有效实施,即如果要向法证检验人员或者由法证检验人员提供最好的信息,以提高法证决策质素,并尽量减少偏差,则什么时候进行披露?披露什么?如何披露?向谁披露?为什么披露?