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11 June 2009 / Roger Smith
Issue: 7373 / Categories: Features , Profession
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Book reviews: The Justice Gap: whatever happened to legal aid?

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The Justice Gap: whatever happened to legal aid?

Steve Hynes and Jon Robins, pp171

Legal Action Group, £20, ISBN: 9781903307632

 
This is just the kind of book that the Legal Action Group (LAG) ought to publish. It is clearly written; provides a good account of the history of legal aid; analyses its current problems; searches for solutions. Legal aid practitioners will probably say that they are too busy surviving on meagre levels of pay to read it. But, if their remuneration is not to be reduced yet further, those who defend access to justice have to find a language and a set of ideas which will get legal aid the priority that it deserves.

Understandably, the book spends most of its time discussing events under the Labour government since 1997. Critical in general though they are, the authors are occasionally over-generous. The Community Legal Service (CLS) was a slogan dreamt up on the back of a fag packet by Paul Boateng

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