Opinion: ‘The law is closed!’

Here’s a challenge for all you budding writers out there.

 

 

We need a new Charles Dickens, to highlight the miseries of our disintegrating systems, and in particular our legal system.

Jonathan Goldsmith

Jonathan Goldsmith

Dickens (pictured below) famously worked in an attorneys’ office in Gray’s Inn, and subsequently became a law reporter, which helped form the background of his descriptions of the law, including Jarndyce v Jarndyce in ‘Bleak House’.

I can just imagine his caricature of a lord chancellor from the present day. This is not our current lord chancellor, but a fictional lord chancellor presiding over similar policies. Glee and miserliness fleck his ceremonial robes as he shouts ‘The law is closed!’. At his feet, criminal and civil legal aid applicants beg for a lawyer to represent them, as their local law firms can no longer afford to help, while in the background a court building crumbles and collapses.

There are serious issues at stake, as we all know.

On the criminal side, the lord chancellor has decided not to implement fully the pay results recommended by an independent review for legal aid solicitors. He has also decided that a royal commission to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the criminal justice system, which was announced in the Queen’s speech following the December 2019 general election, should be kicked into the long grass.

Charles Dickens

Source: Alamy

On the civil side, he has just announced a major review of civil legal aid, to report in 2024 and be implemented, if at all, in 2025 after a general election. Ominously, it will ‘consider value for taxpayers’ money of future policy options and take into account wider budgetary restraints on the department’. That will enable our Dickens’ caricature of a fictional lord chancellor to add a further word to his announcement: ‘The law is closed forever!’

To stay with the civil side, there are already numerous studies on civil legal aid. The Law Society concluded its own in 2021 with very useful facts and figures. But the lord chancellor will nevertheless take a gigantic magnifying glass from the pocket of his robes and search dramatically for new facts and figures, for at least two years.

The civil legal aid review will also include ‘an assessment of how such systems work in other comparable countries’. The Council of Europe has been undertaking such assessments for years. In the ‘European judicial systems CEPEJ Evaluation Report 2022’ – where CEPEJ is the French acronym for the European Commission for the Efficiency of Justice – there is already extensive comparative data on the state of European legal aid systems.

Read the full article at 

https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/commentary-and-opinion/the-law-is-closed/5114733.article?utm_source=gazette_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Belsner+solution+from+the+past%3f+%7c+Big+Four+firm+boosts+legal+practice+%7c+A+new+Charles+Dickens_01%2f10%2f2023