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Clustered Injustice and the Level Green

Clustered Injustice and the Level Green

Author: Luke Clements
Publisher: Legal Action Group
ISBN: 9781913648077
Published In: November 2020
Format: Paperback
Jurisdiction: U.K. ? Disclaimer:
Countri(es) stated herein are used as reference only

HKD 332.50

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'Poor people get hit by cars too; they get evicted; they have their furniture repossessed; they can't pay their utility bills. But they do not have personal legal problems in the law school way. Nothing that happens to them breaks up or threatens to break up a settled and harmonious life. Poor people do not lead settled lives into which the law seldom intrudes; they are constantly involved with the law in its most intrusive forms... Poverty creates an abrasive interface with society; poor people are always bumping into sharp legal things. The law school model of personal legal problems, of solving them and returning the client to the smooth and orderly world in television advertisements, doesn't apply to poor people.'

Stephen Wexler 'Practising Law for Poor People' The Yale Law Journal. Vol. 79: 1049, 1970.

This book is concerned with the legal problems encountered by people whose lives are disadvantaged: disabled people, carers, homeless people, people on low incomes, people falling foul of immigration law … it is a long list. People in this position often experience multiple and synchronous legal problems (‘clustered problems’) for which the traditional ‘single issue’ lawyering approach is ill equipped.

Such people – to cite Stephen Wexler – ‘do not lead settled lives into which the law seldom intrudes; they are constantly involved with the law in its most intrusive forms’. Their legal challenges don’t come in single discrete packages (eg a personal injury claim, a house purchase, a divorce) but are multiple, interlinked and successional. No sooner has one problem been addressed than another is encountered.

This book explores the causes and the effects of clustered injustice, describing the harm that results and why core responsibility for this harm rest squarely with the state. The analysis draws on ‘systems thinking’ and ‘vulnerability’ theories, as well using gaming analogies to illustrate the invidious position of people who experience clustered injustice: people compelled to play legal and administrative games in which the odds are heavily stacked against them.

Book structure:

Introduction – the meaning of clustered injustice
The grain of the law – the ‘loaded’ nature of the law and its bias towards those who enjoy ‘advantage’
What’s your problem? – the legal system’s inability to deal with entangled clusters of problems – except by fragmenting them into their disconnected elements
Juridification – the proliferation of laws and the problems that result: mental capacity and identity laws as examples
Parcelling-out of the soul – public sector bureaucracies and the damage caused by ‘command and control’ systems
Harm – the physical and mental harm caused to those experiencing clustered injustice
Doing justice – how a responsive state would and should address the phenomenon of clustered injustice
Appendix – brief overviews of various groups who experience clustered injustice