David Burrows marks the birthday of legal aid with an examination of its history & how far we have strayed from it
Legal aid will be 70 years old next week on 30 July 2019. The original act—Legal Aid and Advice Act 1949—received Royal Assent on that day. The idea of legal help for poor people, however, in limited forms was known from medieval times.
This article briefly traces the history of legal aid up to the 1949 Act, through to its heyday in the 1970s, and then its decline to its modern version in Legal Aid Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (LASPO 2012), with thanks
to Legal Aid and Advice Under the Legal Aid Acts 1949 to 1964
(ADM Oulton and EJT Matthews, 1971).
The ‘first English [legal aid] statute’, say Matthews and Oulton, is a statute of 1495; though there was legislation in Scotland 70 years earlier. The 1495 statute was intended ‘to admit such persons as are poor to sue in forma pauperis’. Poor persons were not to
