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This paper aims to introduce the concept of “health-justice partnership” (HJP), the provision of legal assistance for social welfare issues in health-care settings. It discusses the role of these partnerships in supporting health and care for people with mental health issues.

The authors describe an example of an HJP; discuss the rationale and evidence for this approach in relation to mental health; and reflect on implementation challenges and future directions in the UK. The authors draw on both health and legal literature to frame the discussion.

Social welfare legal needs have negative impacts on mental well-being and are more likely to occur among people with mental health conditions. Integrating legal assistance with healthcare services can improve access to support for those with unmet need. High-quality research has demonstrated positive impacts for mental health and well-being as a result of HJP interventions. Both further research and wider strategies are required to support implementation of HJPs in practice.

Legal assistance is rarely positioned as a health intervention, yet it is an effective tool to address social welfare issues that are harmful to mental health and to which people experiencing mental health are at greater risk. This paper highlights the importance of the HJP movement as an approach for supporting people with mental health issues.

The purpose of this research is to paint a picture of the current utility of mediation in the Scottish construction sector; determine the willingness of Scottish construction lawyers to shift away from traditional dispute resolution approaches towards mediation; and ascertain the drivers towards the adoption of mediatory techniques and the barriers to change.

Drawn from a questionnaire survey, this paper seeks to add to the dispute resolution literature by identifying the attitudes of construction lawyers on the use and effectiveness of mediation to resolve construction disputes in Scotland.

The findings suggest that there is a core of Scottish construction lawyers in Scotland that recognize the promise of mediation as a useful dispute resolution tool. Respondents generally profess knowledge of the process and some measure of positive practical experience and espouse positive views on mediation. Their response to mediation then does not appear to be one of cultural conservatism or fear of the unknown as opposed to traditional dispute resolution mechanisms, which for all their imperfections lawyers understand unequivocally.

It is recognized that the introduction of mediatory techniques into construction disputes will have a cumulative effect on the Scottish legal fraternity over time. Cross‐sectional studies are often unable to yield information about the direction of causal relationships between variables that are interrelated in a complex way. Neither do cross‐sectional studies permit researchers to assess the effectiveness of intervention strategies.

This is the first empirical work ascertaining the views and experiences of Scottish construction lawyers on mediation. While the research reveals evidence of a modest bottom‐up growth of construction mediation in Scotland, it also provides insight into key policy issues which will require to be resolved if mediation is to move from the margins to the mainstream of construction disputing practices in Scotland.

This purpose of this paper is to critically examine jurisprudentially the current judicial and academic scepticism that exists in some quarters with regard to compulsory mediation primarily from the context of England and Wales. In doing so, it seeks to respond to well-articulated and established concerns with regard to any compulsion in mediation as outlined by Hazel Genn among others as well as some senior members of the judiciary.

This paper seeks to critically examine jurisprudentially the current judicial and academic scepticism that exists in some quarters with regard to compulsory mediation primarily from the context of England and Wales. In doing so, it seeks to respond to well-articulated and established concerns with regard to any compulsion in mediation as outlined by Hazel Genn among others as well as some senior members of the judiciary.

This paper argues that the worries concerning compulsory mediation are unnecessary as they are based on a narrow reading of Article 6 rights, one not shared by many European lawyers, in particular the view taken by them with regards to proportionality. It further argues that compulsory mediation can be an appropriate, proportionate method of dispute resolution in some cases recognising that mediation is not a bar per se to subsequent litigation.

Mediation is an important topic in contemporary law. The theoretical and jurisprudential aspects of mediation have as yet been underdeveloped. This paper is a contribution to this developing debate.

This chapter examines the prevalence of justiciable civil justice problems experienced by Canadians, the ways in which people respond to them and the consequences of experiencing these kinds of problems. The results show that experiencing justiciable problems is a nearly normal feature of the everyday lives of a large proportion of the population in a modern society. Particularly, important features of justiciable problems are the prevalence of multiple problems, the clustering of justiciable problems and the linkages between justiciable, health and social problems. The results suggest that justiciable problems may be a part of broader patterns of social exclusion. One implication of this research is that access to justice services may not only address legal problems but, by doing so, may have the effect of forestalling processes of social exclusion of which civil law problems are a part.

In order to succeed in an action under the Equal Pay Act 1970, should the woman and the man be employed by the same employer on like work at the same time or would the woman still be covered by the Act if she were employed on like work in succession to the man? This is the question which had to be solved in Macarthys Ltd v. Smith. Unfortunately it was not. Their Lordships interpreted the relevant section in different ways and since Article 119 of the Treaty of Rome was also subject to different interpretations, the case has been referred to the European Court of Justice.

OUR pages continue the discussion on book‐display, about which all has not been said by any means. The ingenious librarian will always sharpen his wits upon the attracting of readers, and the main problem in the matter is merely: what sort of reader is it most desirable to attract? We do not apologise for this reiteration, because it is the fundamental subject now facing librarians. We are not in the least moved by a comment in a contemporary that we are decrying libraries when we assert, and in spite of him we do assert, that fiction issues nearly all over London show a decline. That decline, we repeat, is due to the slight increase in the employment of readers, and to cheap fiction libraries. What the public librarian has to decide is if he shall compete with such libraries or more definitely diverge from them. If a middle course is preferred—as it usually is by Britons—what is that course? Ultimately, is the educated reader to be the standard for whom the library works, or the uneducated? Or, to put it another way, is the librarian in any way responsible for the quality of the books his community reads? Our readers, young and not so young, are invited to help us to answers to these live questions.