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Tribute to Professor Francis Regan (2010-03-02)
Professor Francis Regan born August 21th 1954, died January 6th 2010
Written by Jon T. Johnsen, University of Oslo, Norway
On the 10th of December I received a call from Francis Regan. He was in a hospital in Shanghai and had just been diagnosed with cancer. His cancer soon turned out to be incurable. He died on January 6th at the age of 55. His sudden illness and early death was a shock to many. I learned that his funeral was attended by several hundred people – family, friends, colleagues and students. To me the huge attendance showed that he was a man who reached out to people. He touched many with his funny, social and unconventional way of communicating and meant something to them. His network was not limited to people from Adelaide where he lived. It comprehended Australians elsewhere and people from the UK, Canada, Scandinavia and China. Many more of us would have attended his funeral had it not been for the distance.
Francis Regan joined the Legal Studies Department of Flinders University, Adelaide in 1991. He was a gifted teacher and an effective administrator. His teaching and research were closely integrated. He promoted in students a spirit of reform-oriented inquiry and encouraged them to think critically about practical reforms in a realistic and constructive manner.
A year ago I spent three months with Francis at Flinders. We worked at a joint book project. I was astonished to learn about the heavy workload he carried in teaching, supervision and administration and seemingly had done so for many years. When we discussed it and I remarked that such a workload obviously hampered his academic writing, he fully agreed, but it seemed deeply ingrained in his character that people around him – family, students, colleagues, employers – should have priority over his own writing.
Francis became a member of the International Legal Aid Group from the start. He was very active in the group and did a lot to help it develop. He contributed at every meeting. His selfless attitude often led him to take on tasks that others profited more from than he did himself. He was restlessly occupied by bringing new people and new perspectives into ILAG. Recently he was eager at getting people from Eastern Asia participating in the New Zealand Meeting.
Francis was good at collaborating with people. Looking at his bibliography we observe that an unusually high share is written with others and most of them are ILAG members. With me he published two articles on Finnish legal aid. I can confirm that he was very easy to work with, being constructive, funny and dedicated and usually more focused on the common product and his coauthor’s contribution than his own. I came to know him as an academic who had research interests similar to mine and ended up with him as a close colleague and valued friend.
He was the major editor of the Oxford University Press book on Transformation of Legal Aid with several ILAG contributors. It was published in 1999 and still is the most significant common publication from the group. He also edited a volume of the International Journal of the Legal Profession on the History of Legal Aid in 2006.
Like many other activists he became increasingly critical about legal aid in his home jurisdiction Australia. Reading his drafts on Australia in our common book project sometimes made me ask whether he was a bit unfair in describing the Australian situation. Sometimes he became significantly disappointed with the Australian development. Contrary to many he also became intensely fascinated by legal aid schemes in other parts of the world and wanted to focus on jurisdictions with a political environment more favorable to legal aid development.
Scandinavia became one major point of interest. His fascination for the Nordic countries probably came from welfare research and a hypothesis that societies with a highly developed welfare systems also might have well developed legal aid schemes. Francis consulted me about his studies and I was surprised of his great capacity in communicating with people. In a short time he achieved knowledge of Sweden’s legal aid that bypassed mine although he could not read or speak Swedish. In ILAG he became the expert on Sweden although some of us might remember the vivid opposition one of his theories met at the 2001 Harvard conference from a Swedish participant. I think he actually loved causing this kind of commotion. It obviously refreshed our discussions at that meeting. He had no fear of being corrected or of losing face.. He was a natural academic in the sense that he thought the way to learning went through exposing the knowledge he had, whether solid or not, to others and learn from the reaction whether confirming or critical. He did not think it a defeat to be corrected, just a way to learn more.
In 2003 we studied Finland’s legal aid schemes together. Francis became well known and liked in Finland too, and the Finnish participation in ILAG meetings increased. It might have helped that he thought the Finnish scheme possibly the best scheme in the world.
He then became deeply fascinated with a very different society, namely China. He spent a sabbatical and taught at a university in Beijing in 2003. He learned some Chinese and overcame the significant cultural and language challenge that communication with Chinese scholars, students and legal aid officials represented. He also met his second wife in China. Francis was among the few Westerners who have been allowed to witness a Chinese criminal trial. It concerned theft of a motorized bike, which is a serious although not major crime in China. His objective, analytical study of the case left a picture of a criminal justice system that is harsh on crime and has little sympathy on suspects that are considered liable. It is a pity it is still unpublished.
The speed and seriousness of the Chinese attempts at building a Western inspired justice system with a sophisticated legal aid scheme obviously impressed him. He generally wrote favorably about Chinese legal aid; although he was not at all blind to the weaknesses of their schemes. His main point was that progress was impressive given that prior to 1996 no legal aid scheme existed. In a few years’ time the Chinese legal aid scheme has become among the largest in the world counted from cases and personnel involved. It might be argued that China also is by far the most populous jurisdiction in the world, but still their legal aid development is impressive.
What sorts of insights into legal aid does his work leave behind? His main focus is well expressed in the working title he proposed for the book we were working on when he died – “Best Policies for Legal Aid”. I think results on the ground – schemes that actually improved access to justice for poor and ordinary people – mattered more to him than academic success. Still he recognized that a well conducted academic analysis could provide policymakers with valuable tools for reform and that it was an important task for research to provide such insights. Francis was not afraid to use humour to get his point across. His writing had an accessibility that other scholars could only envy, and he put this to good effect. The very readability of his writing enabled others to grasp the complex and abstract issues he was addressing. I think his published articles have a lot to offer.
Among his works are reports to governments in Australia, Finland, Taiwan and China on evaluations and reforms in their national legal aid schemes. These reports might not reveal astonishing and hitherto hidden insights, but they argue in pedagogic and well structured ways the necessity of a range of reforms like providing mass advice, telephone service, differentiated provision, efficient management, quality assurance etc. Like other ILAG members, he obviously saw it as a major task to produce viable models for legal aid development. He realized the usefulness of establishing an international clearing house or toolbox for legal aid reform and making it available to policy makers, administrators and other legal aid activists. Several of his policy advices also have been put into practice in different jurisdictions.
Another idea of his is that societies should use multiple legal aid providers. It is a development of the “mixed model” approach that he regarded as too simplistic. Francis thought that the experiences from several jurisdictions with NGOs and other non commercial legal service providers contain a variety of models useful to legal aid His concern was how they might be used to widen a discussion focusing on the seemingly narrow distinction between judicare and salaried provision. He also advocated emphasis on non litigation advice that he found in common law countries and contrasted it to the litigation approach that characterizes legal aid in many civil law jurisdictions.
His interest in the history of legal aid might stem from his perception of legal aid policy as a remedy for “intractable” or “recurring” problems – a category of social problems to which society does not find efficient or lasting solutions both due to their complexity and lack of reform models, and also to the fact that they primarily relate to the underclass. Reforms tend to be provisional and superficial, more aimed at getting the issue off the political agenda for a period than promoting substantive change. With irregular intervals the insufficiency of legal aid surfaces in politics again and call for new reforms.
More than the rest of us he focused his research on other countries instead of his home jurisdiction. Looking at his academic contributions on legal aid over the last twenty years, the number of publications on other jurisdictions and cross cultural issues by far exceeds his publications on the Australian situation. Francis Regan became a true international scholar in legal aid.