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28 June 2018 / Steve Hynes
Issue: 7799 / Categories: Opinion , Legal aid focus
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Past hurt can’t diminish the hope

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What can legal aid practitioners & users learn from the World Cup? Steve Hynes plays a blinder

A few days before the start of the World Cup academics and researchers gathered for a conference on Access to Justice and Legal Services at University College London (UCL). The conference was run by the UCL Centre for Empirical Legal Studies and was attended by delegates from a range of countries as diverse as the other event which was about to kick off in Moscow. Instead of the excitement and frustration of the beautiful game though, delegates were treated to a succession of papers from researchers intended to stimulate thinking on access to justice policy.

Rather like in football the UK had always considered itself a world power in legal aid services. This perceived ascendancy has outlasted the sporting one which died a death (or should have done!) when Poland forced a draw at Wembley in 1973 shutting England out of the 1974 finals. For many years international conferences on legal aid were dominated by the

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