No abstract available. / Thesis (LL.M.)-University of Durban-Westville, 2001.

When Fitzroy Legal Service (FLS) opened in December 1972 as the first non-Aboriginal community legal centre in Australia, Its volunteer workers posed a radical critique of the legal system and of the legal profession. They depicted both to be intricately involved in the oppression of Australians on low incomes. In a bid to combat this oppression, FLS developed two broad objectives: to provide free and accessible legal assistance, and to operate as a medium of social change. The adoption and pursuit of these at times contradictory aims amounted to an attempt by FLS volunteers to marry the politics of the New Left to the workings of the law. The adoption of these aims also meant that FLS would be involved, at a very practical level, in the debate concerning the relationship between the law and social change in Australia. / In the years after its formation, the radical critique once posed by FLS dissipated. This occurred primarily because the State, n the form of the Whitlam Government moved to accommodate the most persuasive criticisms that FLS workers had of the legal system. The Whitlam Government’s creation of a new legal aid system in 1973, the high profile taken by FLS workers in debates about legal aid and the fact that FLS received government funding were all crucial to FLS’s increasingly accepted status as a part albeit an unusual one of the legal profession. / Notwithstanding this acceptance, FLS workers have continued to pursue the organisation's two original aims. As a result of this FLS has continued to draw clients and workers to the Service, while at the same time it has continued to operate as an effective social critic.

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität, Kiel, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. xv-xix).

published_or_final_version / Public Administration / Master / Master of Social Sciences

No abstract Provided. / Thesis / Bachelor of Arts (BA)

This study focuses on the right of access to justice and the factors that limit the realisation of the right. It also examines the concept of legal aid, its importance and then discusses the legal aid schemes that have been developed in Tanzania and Ghana and how they promote the right of access to justice. The author also compares the legal aid schemes of Tanzania and Ghana and how the legal aid schemes could be improved to further promote the right of access to justice / Thesis (LLM (Human Rights and Democratisation in Africa)) -- University of Pretoria, 2008. / A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Law University of Pretoria, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Masters of Law (LLM in Human Rights and Democratisation in Africa). Prepared under the supervision of Dr Kwadwo Appiagyei-Atua of the Faculty of Law, University of Ghana, Legon / http://www.chr.up.ac.za/ / Centre for Human Rights / LLM

Legal aid programs comprise a robust national infrastructure attempting to alleviate and reduce poverty. Since their proliferation as part of the War on Poverty, these organizations have provided individual civil legal assistance and engaged in collective legal and political strategies to advance systemic change. Starting in the 1980s, however, public policies have been enacted to cut funding and restrict the ability of federally funded legal aid programs to engage in collective and systemic advocacy. As a result, the ability of programs to work alongside low-income communities has been compromised. The histories and core commitments of legal aid and social work are linked. As a profession social work is concerned broadly with efforts to address poverty and specifically with the self-determination and empowerment of those experiencing poverty directly. In this study a constructivist grounded theory design was used to examine the process of collaboration between legal aid attorneys and client community members. The sample for the study included 28 attorneys, client community members, and other stakeholders affiliated with three legal aid programs. Based on 28 interviews and two focus groups with these participants, a conceptual framework entitled Collaborating for Justice in a Legal Aid Context was constructed. Findings suggest that both primary stakeholder groups were motivated to act by the unequal access to advantage in the world around them. Once affiliated with legal aid, they were constrained by scarcity of resources but nonetheless acted creatively to collaborate as well as to enhance collaborative capacity. Collaboration occurred in different timeframes, and this temporal element suggested ways that individuals and organizations can extend and deepen collaboration. Collective activities, informal interaction, and boards and advisory groups all played roles in facilitating collaboration between legal aid programs and their client communities. Through these actions, participants and their affiliated organizations were able to move from circumstances of scarcity to circumstances of generativity and development. Implications for education, practice, and policy are discussed.

This thesis deals with an issue of a right to legal aid. The aim of the thesis is to introduce how the right to legal aid as a one of the basic human rights falling within so called right to a fair trial is implemented in the Czech Republic. This thesis concerns with opportunities which has a person seeking for legal aid in the Czech Republic. An analysis of the implementation of the right to legal aid in practice is the core issue of the thesis. The analysis is divided according to subjects who participate on the implementation of this right. The thesis focuses on an impact of advocacy on implementation of the right to legal aid, role of courts regarding their duty to inform parties to legal proceedings. Last, but not least, there is a mention about other subjects participating on the implementation of the right to legal aid in the thesis. The end of the thesis considers the availability of legal aid in the Czech Republic, evaluation of the contemporary legal regulation of the provision of legal aid and with a view to the future law there are described some possible measures which may be adopted to improve the present situation in day-to-day implementation of the right to legal aid.

This dissertation is a social, political, and cultural history of the organized Chilean legal profession in the first half of the twentieth century. It explores the causes for the creation of the Chilean Bar Association and its Legal Aid Service in the mid-1920s and follows their evolution until the mid-1960s. In the early twentieth century, lawyers were dealing with growing internal and external challenges to the traditional power they had occupied in the Chilean state throughout the nineteenth century. The main internal challenge was the social and political diversification of lawyers; the external one was the social question and working- class mobilization, which represented a threat to the existing oligarchic social and political order. Both issues questioned the traditional place of lawyers in society, their formalistic understanding of the legal system, and the role of law as the main state- building tool. In response to these threats, a group of male elite Santiago lawyers founded the Bar Association in 1925, and its Legal Aid Service, in 1932. These two institutional mechanisms created and enforced a hegemonic discourse of “professional prestige” that affirmed the power of the traditional legal elite over the growing number of middle-class, leftwing, provincial, and women lawyers. These two institutions also modified the engagement of the legal profession with the state, replacing its former political engagement with a new technical, “apolitical” and “social” function of lawyers more atuned to the new welfare state. The internal power dynamics within the Chilean Bar Association and the Legal Aid Service explain the process through which the Chilean legal profession defined the “legal field,” as increasingly distinct from, but in constant tension with, the “political”and the “social” fields. Indeed, through the combined action of the Bar Association and the Legal Aid Service, lawyers were directed to deal with social inequalities, but only to the extent that this engagement did not challenge the formalistic approach to legal procedures and the liberal understanding of property rights. Furthermore, the final result of this professional project was to push lawyers to withdraw from the field of politics and from the public sphere. However, the process of imposing this notion of lawyering was constantly contested and negotiated with a diversifying constituency of rank-and-file lawyers, and subjected to increasing external pressures from the press, the state, and the lower classes. Thus, the professional model that the Bar had contributed to construct and maintain in the first half of the century would become increasingly contested in the revolutionary decades of the 1960s and 1970s. The relative success of the Bar Association in imposing its model of lawyering in the first half of the twentieth century allows us to understand why the legalistic framework that Chilean lawyers had inherited from the nineteenth century did not change over the course of the twentieth despite the momentous social and political evolution that both profession and country experienced in this period. The history of the Chilean Bar Association thus provides an institutional explanation for the continuity of ideas about the law in the face of accelerated social transformations. At the same time, by revealing the tensions and the resistance that this project faced, the history of the Bar also reveals the gears that would eventually lead to the legal profession’s historical change.

No description available.