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E-book Outsourcing Legal Aid in the Nordic Welfare States

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Penilaian

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The Nordic countries are among the highest spenders in Europe on legal aid, which provides people with legal services when they cannot other-wise afford legal assistance. Figures from 2012 provided by the European Commission for the Efficiency of Justice CEPEJ (2014) show that, of 47 European countries, Norway spends the most on legal aid per inhabitant, Sweden comes sixth, Denmark eighth, Finland tenth, and Iceland elev-enth (for a full discussion, see Chap. 10). However, like many other Western European countries, Nordic countries also face political demands for cost savings, particularly in the face of the years of austerity following the 2008 financial crisis that impacted European welfare states. The wel-fare state was challenged by the entry of private actors into domains that traditionally belonged to the state, and by market-orientated reforms partly inspired by neo-liberal ideas (Bonoli and Natali 2012; Kvist and Greve 2011). This has affected legal aid in Nordic countries, just as it has in countries throughout the world, where legal aid systems are challenged by funding cuts, and there are demands for the setting of new priorities when limited funds are available.The most prominent of such developments has been the recent changes in England and Wales, which has seen dramatic cuts in funding that affect both the supply of legal aid, and those legal professionals providing it. Studies of English legal aid lawyers show how new public management focuses on efficiency, cost control, and external monitoring through vari-ous forms of quality assurance measurements and guidelines (Sommerlad 2001; Sommerlad and Sanderson 2013; Sommerlad and Wall 1999). One major effect of all this, Sommerlad argues, is that legal aid lawyers, once seen as moral or political lawyers—who, as Sarat and Scheingold (1998, p. 3) point out—help raise the moral status of the legal profession by reconnecting law and morality, and by manifesting ‘the idea that law-yering is a “public profession”’ —become a group of lawyers with low morale that damages the political project they set out to defend, namely that of empowering their clients and countering social injustice. Legal aid lawyers are downgraded in the legal hierarchy, are stressed by increasing workloads, earn less, and, finally, turn into burned-out, disillusioned wel-fare workers (Sommerlad 2001). Meanwhile, Eastern European countries also face challenges in developing legal aid schemes, mainly due to mas-sive underfunding. Instead, legal clinics are linked with law schools and legal education (cf. for instance, Barendrecht et al. 2014, p. 82; Piana et al. 2013). The USA fares no better, struggling with an underdeveloped legal aid scheme for criminal cases, and with a civil legal aid system con-sisting of a wide variety of programmes beset with funding issues, and problems to do with federal versus state provision of legal aid (Houseman 2015).

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

362 HAM o

Penerbit

Switzerland : Springer Nature., 2018

Deskripsi Fisik

345 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9783319466842

Klasifikasi

362

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Social Welfare, Problems and Services

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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