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Participation in law reform

Effective access to the legal system requires not only that formal processes work without unnecessary impediment to the litigant, but that the system itself is approachable by the lay person. Included in this is the accessibility for disadvantaged people to mechanisms in place to review and reform the legal system.

This suggests the importance of law reform processes and of the involvement of the individual in these processes. Inevitably, most law reform initiatives derive from the work of bodies from which the public is, in a practical sense, largely excluded: parliamentary committees, law reform commissions, law societies and bar associations.

To some extent, law reform commission inquiries and parliamentary committees permit public involvement through calls for submissions, conducting public hearings and taking oral submissions. However, the realities of disparities in knowledge, language skills, communication pathways and personal associations makes it difficult for the ordinary and uninvolved individual to be in a position to make influential submissions on complex areas of law and policy. As part of the Foundation's consideration of access to justice, we will examine the accessibility of these processes for economically and socially disadvantaged people.

There is often scope for public participation in law reform through involvement in community organisations. The advocacy role performed by many community agencies aims to express and protect the interests of the disadvantaged groups that they deal with on a daily basis. At least in some of these community agencies, there is the possibility of direct public or client involvement in their actual decision-making or operations. This allows for the positions and views of the disadvantaged groups to be instrumental in the policy and lobbying work of the agencies.