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There is growing global interest in how AI can improve access to justice, including how it can increase court capacity. This chapter considers the potential future use of AI to resolve disputes in the place of the judiciary. We focus our analysis on the right to a fair trial as outlined in Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, and ask: do we have a right to a human judge? We firstly identify several challenges to interpreting and applying Article 6 in this new context, before considering the principle of human dignity, which has received little attention to date. Arguing that human dignity is an interpretative principle which incorporates protection from dehumanisation, we propose it provides a deeper, or “thicker” reading of Article 6. Applied to this context, we identify risks of dehumanisation posed by judicial AI, including not being heard, or not being subject to human judgement or empathy. We conclude that a thicker reading of Article 6 informed by human dignity strongly suggests the need to preserve human judges at the core of the judicial process in the age of AI.
The study aims to investigate Ukrainian residents’ access to justice in cases where internally displaced people are compelled to file an appeal with the court against decisions made by State authorities that infringe on their rights to social security and pension support. The study makes use of classification and analogy techniques. Analysis and synthesis were the primary research methodologies. The formal legal method – specifically, the procedures of deduction and systematization – is one of the unique legal techniques employed. The definition of the term “internally displaced person” in the context of international law is the study’s output. It was done to become familiar with the key international agreements that define the legal status of internally displaced people. Using instances from other nations, the issue of internally displaced people within a nation was identified. This occurs during times of war or other situations that endanger the safety of individuals at their place of residence. It emphasizes integrating international best practices to safeguard these people’s rights inside national legal systems, particularly regarding social and pension provisions. It is determined that administrative procedures must be improved.
Chapter 5 on Admissibility delves into the factors determining whether a climate case can be heard in court. It presents a clear understanding of the criteria for admissibility and their potential implications on the trajectory of climate litigation. The chapter also delves into the interplay between domestic and international legal rules and norms and their influence on the criteria for admissibility. The author’s analysis reveals that a restrictive interpretation of admissibility criteria can present formidable access to justice barriers, particularly for those most impacted by climate change. In light of these challenges, the author’s distillation of emerging best practice highlights instances where courts and quasi-judicial bodies have interpreted admissibility criteria to ensure access to justice. Specifically, the chapter highlights cases where these bodies have considered human rights and justice imperatives in their admissibility decisions. These decisions highlight the potential for an inclusive and equitable approach to climate litigation, one that aligns with the global nature of the climate crisis and the urgent need for climate justice.
Chapter 14 on Intergenerational Equity sheds light on how this principle, which posits a responsibility to ensure that future generations inherit a habitable planet, has been invoked in climate cases to date. The authors examine how this principle has been interpreted and applied across different jurisdictions, highlighting the notable contributions of jurisprudence from the Global South in shaping the development and understanding of the principle. Through an examination of leading cases from around the world, they illuminate how courts in these jurisdictions have infused their decisions with a consideration for future generations, thereby advancing a more inclusive and long-term perspective on climate justice. The authors distil instances of emerging best practice where the principle of intergenerational equity has been invoked to guide legal reasoning and judicial decisions in climate cases. They underscore the potential of this principle to shape future climate litigation, particularly as the impacts of climate change increasingly span across generations.
Chapter 4 explores the intricacies of the legal principle of standing, its role in climate litigation, and how it impacts the ability of parties to bring climate change-related lawsuits to trial. The author discusses interpretations of standing across different jurisdictions, such as the United States, New Zealand, and countries in Europe, and explains how these interpretations can either impede or facilitate climate litigation. He distils emerging best practice from this analysis, providing an insightful guide for future climate lawsuits. The author then identifies emerging best practice in interpreting standing rules in a flexible manner, thus allowing a broader range of actors to bring climate-related lawsuits and enhancing access to justice.
This article engages in a theoretical exercise, tackling an intentionally provocative question: is there such a thing as too much access to justice? Conventional wisdom suggests that barriers to access to justice ought to be low. Countless reform efforts put in place throughout the world have sought to expand access to justice and strengthen judicial institutions. What happens when access to these institutions is expanded? Who takes advantage of that access? Who is left behind? Weaving together scholarship on the unintended consequences of legal reforms and empirical examples from access to justice experiments in Canada, China, Colombia, India, Russia, South Africa, and the United States, this article shows how lowering material barriers to access to justice can: (1) increase strain on the legal system, (2) raise but fail to live up to expectations about the possibilities claim-making, (3) reinforce existing inequalities, and (4) offer limited and perhaps inadequate solutions.
This chapter discusses the right to domestic judicial protection under international human rights law. It covers the principles of legality, the right to an effective remedy, and the right to a fair trial, highlighting the importance of domestic legal mechanisms in protecting human rights. The chapter examines the legal standards and procedural safeguards for ensuring access to justice, the obligations of states to provide effective judicial protection, and the role of international bodies in monitoring compliance. It also highlights the challenges in ensuring effective judicial protection and the importance of adopting comprehensive measures to address barriers to justice and provide remedies for victims of human rights violations.
This article investigates the conflict resolution strategies used by individuals facing legal problems in British Columbia through the lens of a people-centered approach to justice. Utilizing qualitative interviews, the research examines how people navigate civil, administrative, and family law issues, focusing on the pathways chosen and the factors influencing their decisions. The findings reveal significant barriers to accessing justice, including the complexity of legal information, the psychological impact of unresolved issues, and the varying levels of legal support. By capturing personal experiences, this research offers insights into the effectiveness of current legal assistance models and underscores the need for more accessible and supportive justice systems. The study contributes to the broader discourse on access to justice, highlighting the importance of understanding legal problem-solving behaviors from the perspective of those directly affected.
Many leading access to justice organizations recognize the importance of including the public’s perspective within programming and policy development. One key question underlying this approach is, how can organizations learn about the public’s experience with legal problems and the law? Noting that conversations about legal problems provide evidence of such experiences, this paper presents a study that examines conversations posted to the social media platform Reddit. It argues that social media can be leveraged to better understand the public’s experience with legal problems and the law and, in doing so, help to inform a person-centred perspective of justice.
Recognizing the justice data deficit across Canada, we undertook a multi-faceted project to better understand access to justice (A2J) issues and legal needs of individuals and communities in Saskatchewan. This paper describes the 2021-2022 Saskatchewan Legal Needs Survey, a multiple perspective service provider legal-needs survey intended to complement user-centred surveys and designed to capture the experiences of justice system users via perceptions of service providers. Comprised of two online self-report questionnaires (Community Agency Survey and Lawyer Survey), data were collected from a provincially representative sample of community agencies (n = 67) and lawyers (n = 272). Results generally highlight respondents’ perceptions of A2J issues and priority legal needs based on their experiences with the communities and clients they serve. Overall, a multiple perspective service provider approach affords greater insight into justice system gaps and serves as a viable model for future person-centered justice data collection projects, nationally and internationally.
Welfarism is the idea that government should always try to make individuals’ lives go better, for them, than they otherwise would, overall. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate welfarism’s compatibility with, and potential to support, the ambitions of person-centred justice. Welfarism is a normative theory applicable to public policy generally, but one which has distinct consequences in the realm of law and legal systems. They are considered just to the extent that they generate the best possible expected welfare consequences for all of the individuals who are affected by them. Welfarism is radically person-centred because it requires lawmakers to treat each individual affected by their work as a distinct locus of value, including those who have been subordinated or ignored.
This paper reflects on the recent, rapid rise in the use of “people-centered justice” language in global policy and international cooperation contexts. People-centered justice has provided a valuable common language to achieve policy buy-in and structure discussions on achieving justice for all, and breakfree from path dependencies of earlier rule of law assistance, and donor support long dominated by top-down support to courts and formal institutions of the justice system. However, recent uses of people-centered justice—without additional clarity—gloss over crucial differences in how justice challenges are framed, which could risk undermining some of its initial progress, or repeating past challenges encountered with rule of law support. Experiences of the OECD, USAID and in the United Nations systems provide contrasting examples of charting new paths, or clinging to well-worn path dependencies. We conclude with several reflections to overcome concerns with current uses.
Self-represented litigants (SRLs) have repeatedly identified overly complex court forms as a major source of confusion and frustration. Digital guided pathways have been identified as one possible means to reduce barriers that the public experiences with court forms — but how effective are guided pathways as access to justice measures? Do they make court forms easier to fill out? If so, how can they be optimally designed and evaluated? This article reports on research seeking to answer these questions through a case study of family law guided pathways developed by Community Legal Education Ontario (CLEO). This study yielded two major conclusions. First, guided pathways can significantly reduce complexity for SRLs and, thus, other jurisdictions should consider adopting them as access-enhancing measures. Second, when designing and evaluating the design of court form guided pathways, a functional literacy framework, combined with user data and human testing, can be helpful in identifying barriers.
This chapter explores ways in which administrative law fails to address problems raised by automated legal guidance. Administrative law requires notice-and-comment procedures for so-called legislative rules, or rules that bind agencies and the public. Other, less binding agency statements regarding the law, including, for instance, statements that offer an agency’s interpretation of the law or its enforcement policy, are subject to lesser procedural requirements. This chapter examines how this blind spot in the administrative law framework mirrors a broader democracy deficit in administrative law. Strikingly, this area of law, the purpose of which is to mandate that administrative agencies act in certain ways to protect the public, simply fails to address the pervasive, and impactful, ways that agencies often communicate law to people through the types of informal explanations found in automated legal guidance. As this chapter argues, administrative law reflects a bias toward sophisticated parties, rather than the general public.
This article examines the feasibility of enforcing Singapore money judgments in Cambodia, focusing on the “guarantee of reciprocity” – an ambiguous yet critical condition. It is ambiguous because Cambodian courts have not yet interpreted it. It is critical because it is perceived as the main obstacle to enforcing foreign judgments. Without a treaty-based mutual enforcement mechanism between Cambodia and Singapore, it is unclear whether a Singapore money judgment could be enforced in Cambodia or if a judgment creditor’s application would be dismissed in any event citing lack of reciprocity. Following an analysis of the laws of Cambodia, Singapore, and Japan, the article concludes that there is no legal obstacle before the Cambodian courts to enforce a Singapore money judgment. The flexible interpretation of the guarantee of reciprocity outlined in this article would enhance access to justice, eliminate a trade barrier, and make the investment environment more attractive in Cambodia.
Look around rural America and you’ll see small towns losing population and suffering brain drain. Look closer, and you’ll notice lawyers are aging and not being replaced by new graduates. Doing nothing is not an option, rural residents deserve legal representation. States are now experimenting with policies to incentivize rural law practice, but ten years ago, South Dakota was first. Based on interviews with rural lawyers, The Rural Lawyer shows how rural incentive programs can work, what it is like to begin a law career in rural America, and how rural lawyers can help small communities thrive.
Rural attorneys are sometimes generalists, but often specialize in a few areas of law. Almost all of the attorneys do criminal legal work, either part-time prosecution, part-time criminal defense, and sometimes both. Lawyers also maintain significant private practices doing transactional and litigation work. This chapter surveys the areas of law practiced and also considers the conflicts that arise for rural lawyers.
The Rural Lawyer takes a close look at the challenges facing small-town America, where populations are dwindling and aging lawyers are not being replaced by new graduates. With interviews and personal accounts, the book shows how incentive programs can address this access-to-justice crisis. It specifically examines the South Dakota Rural Attorney Recruitment Program, which is the first program of its kind in the US and has seen great success in helping to attract new lawyers to small towns. Chapters also explore the larger context of rural economic development and its relationship to the law. With insightful analysis and real-life examples, The Rural Lawyer provides readers with a deep understanding of the challenges facing rural communities and the role that lawyers can play in helping these areas thrive.
This conversation brings together national and international policymakers to discuss the impact of digitalisation on access to justice. The background of the discussion is provided by the United Nation’s Global Goal 16 to ‘provide access to justice for all’. The policymakers contributing to this conversation represent the ministries of justice of Germany and Japan, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law (UNIDROIT) and the Pathfinders for Peaceful, Just and Inclusive Societies. The discussants explore the potential of technology to provide meaningful access to law and justice. They do so within the context of their organisation’s policy initiatives such as digitalising courts and other justice institutions. Referring to reform experiences, they pay attention to facilitators and barriers of technological change. The policymakers also consider the risks of technology for access to justice and emphasise the need to keep digital vulnerability in mind.
This conversation explores how technology changes the way disputes are solved. The focus is on the impact of artificial intelligence. After reporting on a competition, in which lawyers and an artificial intelligence competed to accurately predict the outcome of disputes before the UK Financial Ombudsman, the speaker explains how artificial intelligence is practically used in dispute resolution. Such use cases include the production of information, the creation of focused analyses, the finding of decisions and the generation of communication. The speaker then presents research projects using artificial intelligence to predict dispute outcomes in the courts of different countries. The conversation also addresses the ethical questions arising from different use cases of artificial intelligence in conflict resolution. In conclusion, the potential of artificial intelligence to improve access to justice is identified together with the ethical challenges that need to be addressed.