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09 December 2011 / Dr Jon Robins
Issue: 7493 / Categories: Opinion , Legal aid focus
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Rolling back justice (6)

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Jon Robins signs off his series on life without legal aid

It was welcome to see the House of Lords putting the debate over the future of legal aid into the correct historical context blessed, as its members are, with memories longer than most of us. The veteran human rights lawyer Helena Kennedy—or Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws to give her full title—was one of several peers who invoked the legal aid scheme’s welfare state origins in an epic eight-hour plus debate over the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill. “It was [about] saying that the law is not just that the rich or for those who have money but for all of us,” she said. “That is what having a mature democracy is about.”

This is the last in the “Rolling back justice” series. It seems appropriate in a series of articles that contemplates a bleak and uncertain future for legal aid—despite the government pressing the pause button last week—to also consider the role that our publicly-funded system of law

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