University of Canberra, Australia Mel Cousins focuses on two Catholic countries, France and the Republic of Ireland. Both countries still have limited mutual legal assistance systems. Cousins analyzes the evolution of legal aid based on several factors, including: In the final chapter, Don Fleming examines the Australian legal aid authorities` response to multi-party applications. Fleming`s review would have benefited from more data (e.g., Victoria Legal Aid did not provide any data), but it is still useful to set the stage for further research in this area. • the legal system (« There does not appear to be a correlation between the density of lawyers in a country and the amount spent on legal aid »), and Although much is written about legal aid systems and services, there are few resources that effectively bring together knowledge and research from a number of countries. By bringing together documents from Australia, Canada, England, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Scotland, Sweden, the United States and Wales, this book makes a valuable contribution to the understanding of legal aid. In a precious chapter, Francis Regan. Examines why legal aid varies from company to business. I found this book very interesting, especially with the coverage of legal aid systems in various countries. It should make a useful contribution to debate and policy-making in this area. – Alternative Law Journal, Vol. 26, No.
2, April 2001 Useful approaches to explaining differences in transnational legal aid rules. – The Law and Politics Book Review (e) Legal aid plans should have specific administrative structures for clinical matters; and Frederick Zemans and Aneurin Thomas contribute to a chapter that might be of interest to Alt readers. LJ. It examines the perspectives of community legal and judicial centres, with a focus on Austria, Ontario and England. Zemans and Thomas highlight the success of the centres in Australia and Ontario and suggest that these centres will survive and perhaps thrive in the face of current challenges, particularly in the following circumstances (see pp.85-8): Tamara Goriely examines different models of the role of law in a welfare state, in this case Britain. It traces the transition from a focus on the collective application of social rights to individual application, and then the transition of the 1990s to consumerism. Consumer Affairs now focuses on complaint services. « It is too legalistic, too dominated by justice and focuses too much on individual work to the detriment of education and reform activity » (p. l 08).
Publicly funded legal aid has evolved rapidly over the course of this century. Legal aid, which evolved from charities to large publicly funded programs, flourished in many Western countries in the 1960s and 1970s. But in the 1980s, governments began to lose confidence in publicly funded legal aid. In the 1990s, Sweden, England and Wales, the United States, Canada, Australia and the Netherlands experienced significant reductions in funding and eligibility. In response to the need to better understand the extraordinary rise and fall of legal aid, this book brings together contributions from leading international researchers in the field. Researchers from North America, Europe and Australia are studying the origins of modern legal aid, analyzing its recent rapid decline and examining its likely future. However, this collection of original studies does not only describe legal tools that change destiny.