More people in the world now have access to the internet than access to justice. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), only 46 per cent of human beings live under the protection of the law, whereas more than 50 per cent of people are now active users of the internet in one way or another. Annually, one billion people are said to need ‘basic justice care’ but in ‘many countries, close to 30 per cent of problem-owners do not even take action’. As for public funding of legal and court services, it was found in a leading global study of legal aid, involving 106 countries, that around one-third ‘have not yet enacted specific legislation on legal aid’ and that the ‘demand for legal aid for civil cases is largely unmet in most countries.’4 Meanwhile, the courts of some jurisdictions are labouring under staggering backlogs—for example, 100 million cases in Brazil (as noted), and 30 million in India. Even in those legal systems that are described as ‘advanced’, court systems are under-resourced, and the resolution of civil disputes invariably takes too long, costs too much, and the process is unintelligible to ordinary people. The broad case for change is self-evident—in varying degrees, the court systems of our world are inaccessible to the great majority of human beings.
The Case for “Good” Legal Representation: Is it worth fighting for?
