A new report authored by a leading academic has called for a wholly new approach to civil justice, condemning the succession of judge-led reviews that have tried to fix the systemic crisis.
Analysis of how to improve civil justice reform by Dr John Sorabji, associate professor of law at University College London, found that the four major reviews going back to 1988 have failed to properly solve the significant deficit in access to justice.
The report claimed the civil justice system remains overly complex, beset by delays and expensive, and afflicted by with too many people litigating without advice or representation.
The Civil Justice Review 1988, followed by reviews led by Woolf, Jackson and Briggs, had sought to address some or all of those issues.
But Sorabji, a former principal legal adviser to the lord chief justice, found they had been framed as court-centric and predominantly judge-led, with a general absence of any lay court users. He further claimed the work was commissioned on the basis of anecdotal evidence while not being informed by an overarching, long-term strategy, and the reviews increasingly concluded in short time periods.
While many of the recommendations from early reviews were implemented, some recommendations were either delayed or viewed by government as ‘tending to be too difficult to implement’.
Sorabji added that in many cases, implementation was adversely affected through government reforms that were independent of the reviews. This was the case, for example, after the Jackson costs reforms were accompanied by cuts to legal aid which were contrary to the assumptions that the judge had made.
The Sorabji report, commissioned by the Nuffield Foundation as part of its public right to justice programme, concluded that effective civil justice reform requires new, permanent and sustainably funded institutional capacity operating within a constitutional framework that treats access to justice as a public good. It also cautioned against treating civil court users as consumers making use of a service.
‘Society and particularly government should explicitly reject the idea that the civil justice system (the means through which access to justice is delivered), and access to it, forms part of the service sector of the economy,’ said the report.
‘If future reform is to be carried out effectively, there needs to be a recommitment by government, set out in and supported by statute, that there is a public right of access to justice and that this is secured through the civil justice system.’
Specifically, the report called for the creation and long-term funding of a permanent Civil Justice Reform Institute which should be responsible for both developing reform recommendations and implementation. This body should have an independent chair and its membership should be diverse and drawn widely from all stakeholders in the civil justice system. The report argued there should be a statutory duty on government to provide the funding for the reform process, rather than threadbare committees working with pro bono support.
No comments yet