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The reunion: 50 years on

11 October 2024 / Roger Smith
Issue: 8089 / Categories: Features , Profession , Legal aid focus
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Roger Smith reflects on the radical vision that created law centres & left a lasting legacy

At the end of July, 70 septuagenarians crowded into a room in Gray’s Inn. Nothing very surprising about that. The Inns of Court are, of an evening, full of groups of old lawyers dining over talk of the triumphs and failures of their youth. But this lot were rather unusual. This was a meeting of those who 50 years ago thought of themselves as the spearhead of the popular radicalisation of the law. They were the survivors of the law centres established half a century ago. I was proud to be among them. I joined Camden Law Centre in the autumn of 1973.

Whether you could tell anything of the youth of the attenders by their current demeanour was an interesting question. Some had achieved an eminence of which they could barely have dreamed. I counted the digital or physical presence of three members of the House of Lords and at least half a

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NEWS
The Supreme Court issued a landmark judgment in July that overturned the convictions of Tom Hayes and Carlo Palombo, once poster boys of the Libor and Euribor scandal. In NLJ this week, Neil Swift of Peters & Peters considers what the ruling means for financial law enforcement
Bea Rossetto of the National Pro Bono Centre makes the case for ‘General Practice Pro Bono’—using core legal skills to deliver life-changing support, without the need for niche expertise—in this week's NLJ
Small law firms want to embrace technology but feel lost in a maze of jargon, costs and compliance fears, writes Aisling O’Connell of the Solicitors Regulation Authority in this week's NLJ
Charlie Mercer and Astrid Gillam of Stewarts crunch the numbers on civil fraud claims in the English courts, in this week's NLJ. New data shows civil fraud claims rising steadily since 2014, with the King’s Bench Division overtaking the Commercial Court as the forum of choice for lower-value disputes
Artificial intelligence may be revolutionising the law, but its misuse could wreck cases and careers, warns Clare Arthurs of Penningtons Manches Cooper in this week's NLJ
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