The project aims to produce a podcast which introduces basic principles and skills necessary for a non-legally trained person to represent themselves in court. It will involve an explanation of the relevant procedural rules, court etiquette and a practical demonstration of a typical court hearing. The podcast will be disseminated initially via YouTube as an open education platform with the potential for wider dissemination on social media. The target audience is the general public searching for self-help content online.

The term access to justice is commonly associated with how accessible the court system is for those who need to use it to seek a legal remedy. The rule of law cannot be upheld without a means of enforcement but the principle is much wider, for example John Rawl’s theory of social justice in the sense of equity in accessing legal redress (Rawls, 1996). State provided assistance has assisted in a formal sense since the Legal Aid and Advice Act 1949 but was substantially curtailed since the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012. This has led to a greater number of persons being unrepresented. Lord Dyson, Master of the Rolls stated in the House of Commons Justice Committee that, although impossible to prove, if some cases had involved a legal professional rather than a ‘litigant in person’, the outcome of that case would have been different (Dyson, 2015)End of Extract.

The project will provide fresh insight addressing a topic not entirely novel in that theoretical material is widely available but not practical. The narrow focus of substantive area and field of investigation and the defined output in the form of a single podcast mean that the project is realistic for the time scales involved.

Find out more at the conference website:

www.open.ac.uk/blogs/OU-H818/

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References

The Law Society (2017) Access denied? LASPO four years on: a Law Society review [Online]. Available at https://tlsprdsitecore.azureedge.net/-/media/files/topics/research/lapso-4-years-on-review-jun2017.pdf?rev=e7c55732ecd94eae80568cab011f98b8&hash=122A40FE8F04E9C5328D820F0F500DFB (Accessed 17^th January 2021)

Lord Dyson, Master of the Rolls House of Commons Justice Committee (2015) - House of Commons Justice Committee (2015) Impact of Changes to Civil Legal Aid under Part 1 of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 [Online], London, The Stationery Office. Available at https://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201415/cmselect/cmjust/311/311.pdf (Accessed 17th January 2021)

Practice Guidance (Terminology for Litigants in Person) [2013] 2 All ER 624