Legal needs research

This 2010 report from Joh Kirby, from Victoria Law Foundation in Australia, on best practice in community legal information identified seven consistent themes, including the use of technologies and hardcopy publication. Research is needed to understand how to use new technologies effectively and to improve the quality of legal information resources. The report recommends increasing awareness of the benefits of the work, conducting research, exchanging information, and investigating awards and standards.

This research by the Legal Services Research Centre found that lack of knowledge and awareness of legal rights and processes can lead to negative consequences. The survey found that over 10% of people took no action to resolve their problem, and those who did had higher degrees and incomes. The paper suggests that public legal education initiatives can help break entrenched behaviour patterns, and that dedicated research and evaluation is needed to inform future developments. The research was conducted by Alexy Buck, Pascoe Pleasence and Nigel J. Balmer and was published in 2007.

This research by Dave Cowen from 2004 looks at legal consciousness, particularly in relation to unsuccessful homeless applicants. It reveals mixed perceptions of the law, with some seeing it as a barrier, authoritative, just, empowering, or oppressive. The study looks at how applicants make sense of decisions, and how their dignity is undermined by the bureaucracy. It also looks at two 'spaces of production' of legal consciousness - interview styles and decision letters - which contribute to how the interviewees see the law working. The study challenges the notion that applicants have the relevant law at the forefront of their minds when applying for housing.

Research undertaken by the Legal Services Research Centre commissioned and published by Law For Life’s predecessor, the Public Legal Education Network, in 2010 looks at the knowledge and capability of the population of England and Wales to deal with social and civil legal issues.

The research was based on interviews with 10,000 randomly selected people and used data taken from the English and Welsh Civil and Social Justice Survey. The report looks at different groups in society based on their levels of capability, and at how capability relates to the way people handle the legal issues they face. It concludes that there are extensive gaps in knowledge, skills and confidence in the population but these barriers to legal capability are not evenly distributed across different groups or problem types. This research will help target interventions and maximise the effectiveness of public legal education activities.

This paper from 2010 by Dr. Ab Currie, principal researcher at the Department of Justice in Canada looks at the range and the extent to which Canadians handled problems themselves in the context of legal issues. Canadians are more than twice as likely to pursue a self-help option than to use any other path to justice (such as advice and representation). The research also found that self-help options had a high resolution rate with 62% expressing satisfaction with the outcome.

This research examines the legal capabilities of social care practitioners in the Netherlands, specifically in relation to a new decision-making process called "the kitchen table conversation" which is used in the Netherlands since the introduction of the 2015 Social Support Act. The law delegates the allocation of social care to local authorities, who employ social care practitioners to assess and decide upon the needs of applicants for personalised services. The study found that the extent of legal capabilities of social care practitioners to handle this new process is unknown. It used a case study of Utrecht, gathering data through participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and group interviews with social care practitioners between October 2016 and May 2017. The analysis revealed the legal knowledge of social care practitioners and their awareness of the legal consequences of the kitchen table conversation. However, the study found that social care practitioners rely heavily on their interpersonal skills and on elective communication to avoid conflicts leading to legal procedures or involving their individual liability. The study suggests more research is needed on the universal accessibility of social care services in the context of decentralisation.

Why do some people feel able to act to deal with legal problems when others don’t? What makes some people feel empowered when others lack confidence?

Martin Gramatikov and Robert Porter of Tilburg University in the Netherlands have developed the concept of Subjective Legal Empowerment (SLE) in order to measure legal empowerment. Their challenge is to measure it, and through measuring it, to evaluate improvements.

SLE utilizes the psychological theory of self-efficacy in the context of legal problems. Their focus is on members of the public or ‘end users’, clients of organisations, and they have developed a measurement methodology to establish how people view their ability to solve legal problems, that is to say their legal empowerment

This essay from Anthoney Alfiere in 2008 considers whether the effective delivery of scarce legal goods to disadvantaged clients requires more than the provision of equal access, case-by-case representation, and zealous advocacy. Scarcity requires that effective legal change be measured not by the outcomes of individual cases, but rather by the progress of social change: specifically, by the degree to which individual clients are able to collaborate in local and national alliances to enlarge civil rights and to alleviate poverty. Alfieri calls for alternative education, training and curricular initiatives in clinical and legal education. He considers critical theory, which could be improved to help law students address difference-based client and community identities. Cross cultural training is needed to include a greater awareness of lawyer-client differences. Changes would include a challenge to neutrality and greater client participation in the lawyering process - moving beyond individual case-specific decision-making to issue-focused, neighbourhood-wide interests in legal advocacy.

This study discusses the challenges in determining the legal knowledge of the population. The study found that self-reporting of rights knowledge is problematic as individuals often overestimate or underestimate their entitlements. The complexity of the ways in which people describe and make sense of the law adds to the difficulty.

The study suggests that legal education should focus on recognising that legal knowledge and effective rights claiming are not always directly correlated and that broader knowledge and negotiation skills may be more important than specific legal knowledge in certain situations. It also suggests that legal education should take into account the complexity and variability of legal systems and how people interact with them.

This research was conducted by Catrina Denvir, Nigel J. Balmer, and Pascoe Pleasence for the the Legal Services Research Centre. It was published in 2007 as an annex to the PLEAS Task Force Report, 'Developing capable citizens: the role of public legal education'. The detailed findings make a clear case for the value of public legal education.

Marc Galanter's influential essay* from 1973 identifies two key players in the legal system - one-shotters (the 'have-nots') and repeat players (the 'haves') and asks if reform could be achieved by 'have-nots' taking co-ordinated action. Galanter argues that 'haves' have the ability to 'play the litigation game differently from a one-shotter’ and this ability to play differently, affords the repeat player substantial advantage and benefits. He considers four types of reform - rule change, improvement in institutional facilities, the improvement of legal services in terms of quantity and quality and the reorganisation of parties. Reorganising 'have-not' parties into coherent groups that have the ability to act in a co-ordinated fashion is shown to be a way of improving their strategic position. Subsequent studies have confirmed that 'haves' still maintain their advantage.

_{*This is an academic analysis and theory-building and is based on a review of research.} 

Martha Nussbaum's essay from 2003 looks at Amartya Sen's theory of social justice and the importance of capability. Nussbaum argues that capabilities must be defined and introduces a list of ten Central Human Capabilities to help measure quality of life and provide basic political principles. She stresses that citizens should be given the option, in each area, of functioning in accordance with a given capability or not as they choose. Nussbaum also points out that society has varying levels of dependency and that the best way of thinking about what it is to secure fundamental rights is to think in terms of capabilities. The essay looks at the close relationship between capabilities and rights, and the importance of the social contract.