Lawyers, Gatekeeping and Access to Justice: A Critical Analysis

Lawyers face increasing pressure from clients, politicians, prospective hires, international and civil society organisations to act as gatekeepers: to reject certain clients or cases or mitigate their involvement. This can be at variance with the traditional role of lawyers to provide access to justice.

This volume presents a systematic exploration of the gatekeeping debate. It discusses the key dimensions of gatekeeping, the risk of abuse of identifying lawyers with their clients in authoritarian regimes, the limits of partisan lawyering and the legal boundaries to representation. It also discusses the question of representation that may be in line with professional duties, but still be considered controversial based on soft law, moral or societal expectations. A key take away is that the gatekeeping discussion would benefit from the differentiation between whether a client deserves representation and how a lawyer should represent the client.

The contributions are written by high profile academics and professionals from various jurisdictions around the globe, aiming to provide solid, multi-facetted, balanced and comprehensive guidance for lawyers, academic researchers, regulators, bar associations and law societies.