Legal Action Group - Justice Matters

David Renton of Garden Court chambers, discusses  his column about employment law and P&O Ferry's. He'll also be asking if legal action is all it's cracked up to be.  Professor David Cowan of the University of Bristol  takes us through his mortgage and owner occupier law update in the magazine.  Legal Action magazine's editor Louise Heath, shares highlights from the May edition. 

Immigration law and asylum support law legends Jawaid Luqmani, and Sue Willman,  relatively new legal action magazine writer Carolynn Gallwey of Bhatt Murphy and Jennifer Blair of Ukraine Advice Project UK talk with our host Simon Mullings.  

Adam straw QC, Doughty Street Chambers and Ollie Persey, Garden Court Chambers, discuss Adam's new book, 'Discrimination in Public Law' Legal Action Group 2022.

Professor Lisa Whitehouse, Southampton University, sets out what we can learn from her recent work assessing the court system’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic in housing possession cases in England and Wales.

Fiona Bawdon, legal affairs journalist, introduces the 2022 LALY's.

Simon Creighton, Bhatt Murphy, gives an overview of the two part prison law recent developments.

Welcome to this, the third legal action group podcast. We're thrilled to introduce you to what promises to be a fascinating discussion between our guests. They will be talking about their vital work and also about two new LAG training courses coming up in the autumn. Our guests are Professor Lesley Thomas, QC of Gresham College and also Garden Court Chambers, Deborah Coles of Inquest and leading the questions and discussion is Fiona Bawdon. None of our guests really need introductions, such is the wide ranging influence of their work, but Leslie is a barrister and leading expert in crimes against the police, public authorities bodies, as well as the inquest and public enquiries work. In addition, he finds time to be Professor of Law at Gresham College and is in the midst of his brilliant lecture series. Deborah is executive director of Inquest. Deborah's work encompasses legal casework in cases of deaths in custody and other detention settings and other cases concerning state and or corporate accountability. It also includes campaigning, media activity, as well as remarkable work to support and work alongside family members of those whose lives are taken by the state.  Fiona Bawden is a journalist, campaigner, and founder of the Legal Aid Lawyer of the Year Awards and seems to play a vital role in every Access to Justice initiative going. If you want to do work to change things around access to justice and basically you need to have Fiona onboard.

Simon Mullings talks with Luke Clements, Cerebra Professor of Law & Social Justice at Leeds University, solicitor and author of the book 'clustered injustice and the level green' and Sue James, CEO of Legal Action Group. 

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.

In this, the first LAG podcast, Spike Mullings talks to David Renton about his new book, Jobs and Homes, stories of the law in lockdown.