Legal Aid Policy: A Time for Reflection

In this article, I reflect upon the new pressures placed upon legal services systems in different countries over the past few years through a combination of economic recession and political hostility. I seek to argue that, although the short-term effects of these pressures upon legal aid structures may well be very harmful, in the long term a number of benefits may accrue. I argue that there are three distinct ways in which legal services schemes can reap positive benefit from attack. First, cutbacks in legal aid provide a real-life framework in which to test the validity of the theoretical and political critique of the philosophy of legal aid put forward by legal sociologists over the past decade; second, the need for a delivery system to be justified in terms of cost has led to surprising results that indicate the cost-effectiveness of more radical delivery models; third, economic restraint within the radical fringe of legal aid activity has itself stimulated a creativity of approach, and a forging of original and effective alliances, that would have been less likely in a more financially stable framework.