Current Research ::.
Law and Justice Foundation (Australia, New South Wales, 2009-11-03)
Summary
The Law Foundation of New South Wales was created 42 years ago, establishing a ‘law foundation’ model that has been followed in other jurisdictions in Australia, Canada and perhaps elsewhere. The Foundation has sought to enhance access to justice through research, improving community understanding of the legal system and other practical initiatives to overcome barriers to justice. The Foundation’s initiatives have included increasing access to the law through free online access to legislation and judgements, the development of understandable legal information for the community and the establishment of a community legal information network throughout the public library system across NSW.
Transformed on a number of occasions, the Law and Justice Foundation is now an independent statutory body mandated to contribute to the development of a fair and equitable justice system that meets the legal needs of the community, and to improve access to justice, especially for disadvantaged people. While the Foundation continues to conduct and support a range of community legal information and education and other practical programs, our research is the largest component of our work.
Research
The Foundation uses applied empirical methodologies to examine the legal system and its impact on the community, and especially on disadvantaged people. The bulk of our present work is conducted as part of a broad ‘access to justice and legal needs’ (A2JLN) research program of projects.
A2JLN Program
The A2JLN program’s main purpose is to provide a rigorous and sustained assessment of the legal and access to justice needs of the community, especially disadvantaged people, to assist government, community and other organisations develop policy and plan service delivery.
Our research in this program follows three general streams:
The collection and analysis of legal assistance and inquiry data from the major not-for-profit (NFP) legal service providers to examine expressed legal need. This is being achieved through our ‘Data Digest Online’ project.
The conduct of large legal needs surveys to get a representative picture of both expressed and latent legal need.
Targeted research to examine the legal needs of particularly vulnerable groups.
Data Digest Online (DDO)
Currently in its Beta-phase prior to selected release late this year, the DDO brings together, harmonises and makes accessible through a user-friendly interactive web-based tool, more than one million records of legal matters relating to inquiries made to the major NFP legal service providers in NSW. In particular, the DDO allows users to analyse and spatially display the relationships between legal matters, demographic characteristics, and a range of other relevant data, such as indicators of socio-economic disadvantage. (It should be noted that the DDO uses data owned by the NFP agencies, and is a tool largely for their use. It has associated risks concerning confidentiality, privacy and misinterpretation, and will not be publicly available, although reports and articles etc will be published by the Foundation.)
National Legal Needs Survey
Following the publication of Justice Made to Measure (2006) reporting the results of our legal needs survey in selected disadvantaged areas in NSW, the Legal Aid Commissions in all Australian states and territories have supported the Foundation to expand a planned NSW-wide survey into a national survey of legal needs. The fieldwork for this survey (over 20,000 interviews) has been completed and data cleaning prior to analysis is continuing. It is planned that larger, individual state/territory reports will be published before we move on to more focused, follow-on analysis of more difficult groups/issues made possible by the size of the sample.
Targeted Research
Having published reports into the legal needs of older people, homeless people, people with a mental illness and, most recently, prisoners, our current project in this stream explores the access to law reform processes and participation needs of both the community generally and disadvantaged people in particular using case studies in law reform. Publication of this report is expected in the first half 2010.
‘What Works’
Evaluative research examining legal system processes and reforms has been a focus of the Foundation’s research program over many years. Although the Foundation has worked primarily on the A2JLN program in the last few years, we have also contributed to evaluative research with external partner researchers on a number of projects, such as the evaluation of the fairness and process of the mental health tribunals in NSW, Victoria and the ACT.
‘What Works’ Systematic Reviews
Our research effort is also trialling and adapting appropriate methodologies to systematically review available evaluations of programs and reforms that have been aimed at meeting particular legal needs. As there appears to be few reliable empirical evaluations of programs targeting some of the most significant areas of need, our intent is to develop a methodological model that allows policy makers and service providers to get the most out of the available quantitative and qualitative data. Our first such systematic review – Outreach legal services to people with complex needs: what works?- will be published later this year.
Just Search!
The Foundation’s website contains a powerful search tool that enables rapid searches on specific topics across the full-texts of all recent Foundation reports, as well as identifying other key reports and plain language community legal information and education material relevant to the search topic.