When legal rights are not a reality: do individuals know their rights and how can we tell?

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.     

Ignorance in Bliss: Modeling Knowledge of Rights in Marriage and Cohabitation

We live our lives against an extensive backdrop of legal rights and responsibilities, yet a growing number of studies indicates low levels of public legal literacy. In the context of opposite‐sex cohabitation and marriage law, this study employs new survey data from the United Kingdom to explore, in detail, how many and which people are ignorant of the law, and what are the nature and origins of erroneous beliefs. We find that people's beliefs about both cohabitation and marriage law are frequently wrong. They are also strikingly similar, and reflect the divergence of social attitudes from the law. Our findings are consistent with the notion that legal literacy links to salience of issue. They are also consistent with recent public legal education initiatives that affected public understanding of cohabitation law, but we argue that social attitudes and the intransigence of erroneous beliefs generally present significant challenges to such initiatives.