Wrapped up in some fairly predictable lawerly laments about Thatcher’s Cameron’s heartless cuts in legal aid there is a fascinating examination of the rise of the crowd-sourced legal advice website here: Tricks and cheats are the price of culling legal aid
Motoring trials are more frequently now defended by people who are making use of public special-interest websites such as PePiPoo which give advice to motorists both prior to and during a trial. Some advice is sound, some not so sound, but with the capacity to share approaches to defence has come the temptation in forums to share advice which, if followed, would result in a miscarriage of justice.
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In some ways sites like these are a good thing: mass participation to help individuals to establish their legal rights is laudable, but to the extent that they encourage bad-faith practices, and ultimately provide tools to undermine the already buckling justice system, they are a serious problem – a price to be paid for legal aid cuts. The insatiable demand for help with litigation has given rise to websites on which anyone can offer their opinion on the law whether it is correct or misleading. In those circumstances it’s the individuals in need of help who will lose out, running trials on a hiding to nothing, which will leave them worse off than when they started.
The author, the barrister Rupert Myers, whose articles for the Guardian are usually more friendly to civil liberties, concludes that “the government must find ways to curb the spread of tricks and cheats, while replacing these sites with the benefit of reliable help for those that need it.” I suspect the call to replace these open websites with government ones is his professional self-interest talking. It does not matter. The government cannot replace these websites. Oh, they could find some legal grounds to close down these particular ones, PePiPoo (weird name) and Child Support Agency Hell, and “replace” them with government information website number four million and six, which rather fewer people would trust on account of the legal advice being sought in these cases being advice on how to legally fight branches of that same government. But unless the government is willing to censor the internet to a degree hitherto unprece- OK, better stop there for fear of giving ’em ideas.
As I was saying, now we have the internet people are going to discuss their problems on it, including their legal problems. Other people are going to give them advice. Have you noticed that about the internet? Rather sweet, I always think; the only thing people like doing on the internet more than talking about sex is advising others on everything from plumbing to childbirth for no reward. Of course some of the advice you get from unqualified strangers is bad. That, however, has also been known to be true of advice from qualified professionals.
“[P]rofessional self-interest” undoubtedly. Lawyers (one of the oldesst professional guilds) have always jealously guarded the doors to their temple, which or course is the primary function of all guilds. Since they are better able to hamper admission to practice than are other guilds (as they control both the courts and the legislature), their rules are tighter and they squawk more when someone finds a chink in their armor. (Notice, by the way, the plethora of self-help medical websites; I don’t hear much grumbling about that from doctors.)
Personally, I think these self-help legal websites are great, even if the advice is sometimes a bit dodgy. The immense growth in government, and the ever-increasing regulation of nearly every aspect of our lives, is unsustainable, and piling extra burdens on the courts (“undermin[ing] the already buckling justice system”) is a Good Thing. We need to be throwing monkey wrenches (“spanners” to you Brits!) into the works wherever possible, to bring down the entire edifice. It’s applying the Cloward-Piven strategy in support of less government, not more (in other words, for good rather than evil as was originally intended).
Fear of competition clearly. Funny how they do not mind how the extension of publicly funded legal aid competes with private professionals.
Let’s underreimburse lawyers the same way Medicare/Medicaid underreimburse doctors.
Heck, every restriction the lawyer-legislators want to impose upon doctors should be imposed upon lawyers as well.
great job
thanks for sharing
This is coming from a lawyer?!!!
‘Liberal’ Guardian type wants to ban something and more government provision and regulation.
What next on Samizdata? Dog bites man?
I look at this from a different angle.
As I understand it both (UK/USA) our systems of justice have aspects of jury of ones peers. The notion is that justice should be of a quality that does not rise so far above those governed. The use of the internet should simply be a medium by which the common aspect of common law evidences itself. If the practice of justice has to REMOVE such mechanisms it would seem to me prima facie evidence that that system of justice has lost its way. The statement seems to be “the acceptable dispensation of justice has to comport just so” and can only be actuated from on high. If this is so, then tyranny is here. I’m not advocating mob rule, simply that if the execution of justice is so particular as to be beyond common discussion, and that that discussion is seen as dangerous, then we’ve got a problem.
The rot set in when we abandoned the old, Scottish, law that made barratry a hanging offense.
Any law that can only be interpreted with the assistance of professionals is by definition unjust. I’m all for burning the whole thing down and starting over.
Assuming for a moment that the concept of civil society works (I’m not so sure), the laws you actually for it to function need are surprisingly few in number.
Who’d need a lawyer in a society with only, say, 20 laws? “You stand accused of breaking rule #7 – No Murder”
“Yeah but look, there’s the victim over there – alive”
“Case dismissed!”
Here in the USA, information on the internet about how to fight Child Protective Services has been invaluable to people who have had their children snatched by government “social workers” (who typically do NOT have degrees in social work.) Very few attorneys specialize in this field of law, because most of the potential clients would be impoverished single mothers or the working poor.
Interestingly, it became a common practice for “social workers” interviewing parents accused of neglect/abuse to ask them if they had a computer, or otherwise had access to the internet.
The most common advice given to parents under attack by Child Protective Services was to attempt to videotape or audio tape every single interaction with CPS, and this infuriates CPS because it “violates the child’s right to privacy”! (Of course, stripping a child naked and photographing him is OK if you are employed by CPS, because it is all part of your professional duty.) Another piece of advice given out on the internet was to demand regular access to your case file, and photocopy all of the pages, in order to prevent them from illegally deleting pages that no longer fit in with their ever-changing theory of what is wrong with your family.
Some of the legal advice on the internet may be worse than useless, but some of it has done a great deal of good.