The authors describe the origins and history of legal aid as well as New Labour's attempts to reform the system years on. They argue that on its 60th anniversary legal aid has fallen short of its original aims.

This book examines the justice gap and trial process for sexual assault against both adults and children in two jurisdictions: England and Wales and New South Wales, Australia. Drawing on decades of research, it investigates the reality of the policing and prosecution of sexual assault offences – often seen as one of the ‘hardest crimes to prosecute’ – across two similar jurisdictions. Despite the introduction of the many reform options detailed in the book, satisfactory outcomes for victims and the public are still difficult to obtain. Cossins takes a new approach by examining the nature and effects of adversarialism on vulnerable witnesses, jury decision-making and the structures of power within the trial process, to show how, and at what points, that process is weighted against complainants of sexual assault, in order to make evidence-based suggestions for reform. She argues that this justice gap is a result of a moralistic adversarial culture which fosters myths and misconceptions about rape and child sexual assault, thus requiring the prosecution to prove a complainant’s moral worthiness. She argues this culture can only be eliminated by a radical replacement of the adversarial system with a trauma-informed system. By reviewing the relevant psychological literature, this book documents the triggers for re-traumatisation within an adversarial trial, and discusses the reform measures that would be necessary to transform the sexual assault trial from one where the complainant’s moral worthiness is ‘on trial’ to a fully functioning trauma-informed system. It speaks to students and academics across subjects including law, criminology, gender studies and psychology, and practitioners in law and victim services, as well as policy-makers.

This book is set against the background of the 'justice gap' in sexual assault cases - the dramatic gap between the number of offences recorded by the police and the number of convictions. It seeks to examine the attitudinal problems which bedevil this area of law and possible strategies for addressing them. Written by a professor of law and a professor of psychology, it reviews evidence from socio-legal and social cognition research and presents new data drawn both from interviews with judges and barristers and from studies with prospective lawyers and members of the public. In the final part, it considers different ways in which rape trials could be improved and suggests steps that could be taken to change public attitudes about sexual assault.

"Written by prominent thought leaders in the global FinTech investment space, The LegalTech Book aggregates diverse expertise into a single, informative volume. Key industry developments are explained in detail, and critical insights from cutting-edge practitioners offer first-hand information and lessons learned. Coverage includes: The current status of LegalTech, why now is the time for it to boom, the drivers behind it, and how it relates to FinTech, RegTech, InsurTech and WealthTech Applications of AI, machine learning and deep learning in the practice of law; e-discovery and due diligence; AI as a legal predictor LegalTech making the law accessible to all; online courts, online dispute resolution The Uberization of the law; hiring and firing through apps Lawbots; social media meets legal advice To what extent does LegalTech make lawyers redundant? Cryptocurrencies, distributed ledger technology and the law The Internet of Things, data privacy, automated contracts Cybersecurity and data Technology vs. the law; driverless cars and liability, legal rights of robots, ownership rights over works created by technology Legislators as innovators"--

Presents a definition of social justice, documents the extent of social injustice, and suggests an agenda for social reform.

Around the world, access to justice enjoys an energetic and passionate resurgence as an object both of scholarly inquiry and political contest, as both a social movement and a value commitment motivating study and action. This work evidences a deeper engagement with social theory than past generations of scholarship.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST, NPR, AND KIRKUS REVIEWS A scathing portrait of an urgent new American crisis Over the last two decades, America has been falling deeper and deeper into a statistical mystery: Poverty goes up. Crime goes down. The prison population doubles. Fraud by the rich wipes out 40 percent of the world’s wealth. The rich get massively richer. No one goes to jail. In search of a solution, journalist Matt Taibbi discovered the Divide, the seam in American life where our two most troubling trends—growing wealth inequality and mass incarceration—come together, driven by a dramatic shift in American citizenship: Our basic rights are now determined by our wealth or poverty. The Divide is what allows massively destructive fraud by the hyperwealthy to go unpunished, while turning poverty itself into a crime—but it’s impossible to see until you look at these two alarming trends side by side. In The Divide, Matt Taibbi takes readers on a galvanizing journey through both sides of our new system of justice—the fun-house-mirror worlds of the untouchably wealthy and the criminalized poor. He uncovers the startling looting that preceded the financial collapse; a wild conspiracy of billionaire hedge fund managers to destroy a company through dirty tricks; and the story of a whistleblower who gets in the way of the largest banks in America, only to find herself in the crosshairs. On the other side of the Divide, Taibbi takes us to the front lines of the immigrant dragnet; into the newly punitive welfare system which treats its beneficiaries as thieves; and deep inside the stop-and-frisk world, where standing in front of your own home has become an arrestable offense. As he narrates these incredible stories, he draws out and analyzes their common source: a perverse new standard of justice, based on a radical, disturbing new vision of civil rights. Through astonishing—and enraging—accounts of the high-stakes capers of the wealthy and nightmare stories of regular people caught in the Divide’s punishing logic, Taibbi lays bare one of the greatest challenges we face in contemporary American life: surviving a system that devours the lives of the poor, turns a blind eye to the destructive crimes of the wealthy, and implicates us all. Praise for The Divide “Ambitious . . . deeply reported, highly compelling . . . impossible to put down.”—The New York Times Book Review “These are the stories that will keep you up at night. . . . The Divide is not just a report from the new America; it is advocacy journalism at its finest.”—Los Angeles Times “Taibbi is a relentless investigative reporter. He takes readers inside not only investment banks, hedge funds and the blood sport of short-sellers, but into the lives of the needy, minorities, street drifters and illegal immigrants. . . . The Divide is an important book. Its documentation is powerful and shocking.”—The Washington Post “Captivating . . . The Divide enshrines its author’s position as one of the most important voices in contemporary American journalism.”—The Independent (UK) “Taibbi [is] perhaps the greatest reporter on Wall Street’s crimes in the modern era.”—Salon