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Disasters significantly reduce the accessibility of justice particularly in rural locations. The bushfires, which ravaged three states in the south-east of Australia in late 2019 and early 2020, have had catastrophic social and economic impacts on people, animals and places in rural areas. In the aftermath of disasters, people by necessity must inevitably avail themselves of legal advice and services: to negotiate new business contracts; re-mortgage property; access wills and testaments; attend court; and for a host of other matters. In rural communities, where access to legal services is already limited by distance and circumstance, disasters create increased demand, and access issues are accentuated. This chapter explores access to justice issues in post-disaster context and as they relate to rural, regional and remote communities. It draws upon post-disaster experiences nationally and internationally, outlining responses to improve access to legal services past and present, identifying effective responses. It argues that rurality creates additional barriers and reduces access to justice, and that disasters exacerbate existing access issues as well as creating new challenges.

Librarians have been urged to emphasize social justice and human rights issues in their library mission, but they may find themselves challenged to provide additional services, such as access to legal information for those who cannot afford an attorney. Social justice services in libraries are seldom adequately funded and providing services in this area is labor intensive. In addition, there is an emotional intensity in library services for social justice that is often not considered in the initial enthusiasm of providing services in this area. Yet there seems to be no limit to the need. An interesting and useful perspective on how a public agency such as a library responds in circumstances of limited resources and unlimited demand can be found in the book Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Service, by Michael Lipsky. In this perspective, lower level civil servants who interact directly with members of the general public exercise a level of discretion in the amount of services provided and how those services are administered. This chapter explores how this can generate tensions between more traditional library bureaucracy and social justice services, such as providing public access to justice resources in law libraries. However, the “street-level” response is evolving into a sustainability perspective as librarians embrace a more social justice–oriented outlook in library service planning.

Access to justice is both a topic of engaged social-legal research and a key component of legal professional ideology. There is a relationship between the two. The more committed the organized legal profession to the issue of access to justice, the higher the profile of scholarly research on topics that relate in one form or another to access to justice. The organized bar's commitment peaked in the 1960s and 1970s, waned in the 1980s, and has not regained the position it once had on the domestic U.S. agenda. In contrast, however, access to justice has recently emerged strongly on the reform agenda that U.S. and multilateral foreign aid organizations – along with the U.S. legal profession – are promoting abroad as part of the renewed post Cold War effort to build the rule of law.

Despite a global consensus that rule of law is desirable, there are important debates about what this entails and how it can be achieved or supported in developing and transitional countries of the Global South. Accordingly, this chapter considers the importance and contextual suitability of rule of law as a building block for ‘peaceful and inclusive societies’ in the context of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). We begin by examining key definitional debates and consider the challenges inherent to monitoring progress towards SDG target 16.3 which seeks to ‘promote the rule of law at the national and international levels, and ensure equal access to justice for all’. We proceed to illustrate some of these definitional and methodological limitations by considering how favourable rankings of model Western democracies mask rule of law deficits that relate to access to justice and the protection of human rights for marginalised populations. This critique highlights an important point that is repeatedly emphasised throughout the rule of law literature: rule of law is not an end state but rather an ideal that all countries must continuously work to realise and sustain. The remainder of the chapter considers the challenges of promoting a Western rule of law agenda in a failed and titular democracy (the Solomon Islands) and a peaceful and prosperous country (Singapore) which adheres to a ‘thin’ definition of the rule of law that does not conform with liberal ideals.

Target 16.7 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) refers to the need for ‘responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative decision-making’ to facilitate just, peaceful and inclusive societies. This chapter discusses why it is important that security and justice institutions, and decision-making therein, are responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative; how to develop such institutions; and how to measure success in this regard. It is argued that the limited scope of the official SDG indicators used to measure progress risks action being taken on less tangible and less measurable but often more meaningful aspects of building just, peaceful and inclusive societies. The chapter argues that facilitating more inclusive decision-making, especially in the security and justice sector (redistributing power), and evaluating progress in this regard (determining what success looks like) are both highly political undertakings. These undertakings are thus, fraught with practical difficulties and likely to generate resistance from those who have a vested interest in retaining the status quo. Retaining focus on the Target and overarching Goal, however, can help avoid implementation being derailed by being distracted by a huge data gathering exercise to respond to a narrow set of quantifiable indicators. It can also ultimately help facilitate transformational change towards just, peaceful and inclusive societies.

This chapter critically analyzes the disparity between presumptive theoretical and technical development literatures and local ways of inhabiting gender and conceptualizing justice in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. This study explores local understandings of sexual violence, gender, and justice to capture a picture of gender, victimhood, and agency that destabilizes hegemonic global narratives of widespread violence and oppression.

Dominant academic and policy literatures often rely on universalized framings of gender, sexual violence, and justice. Broader critiques of Western presuppositions regarding the lived realities of women’s experiences are necessary to bridge the gap between representation and reality.

Without understanding the lives and experiences of women like those in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, imported programs to improve women’s “access to justice” and to “empower” women fail to render an inclusive justice and, ironically, reinforce essentialized conceptions of gender that are themselves an obstacle to women’s empowerment.

The danger of perpetuating hollow myths of oppression and suffering necessitates a re-evaluation of how scholars and development professionals capture the complexity of gender, sexual violence, and conceptions of justice in Indonesia, as well as other countries in the Global South.

This study builds on existing critical literature to problematize global assumptions about sexual violence, and emphasizes how essentialized representations of the feminine as fixed and universally oppressed silence the myriad voices of women of Yogyakarta.

Around the world today, access to justice enjoys an energetic and passionate resurgence. It is an object both of scholarly inquiry and political contest, and both a social movement and a value commitment that motivates study and action. Though the recent resurgence makes much seem new, in fact access to justice has been a topic of policy advocacy and empirical research since the early 20th century (e.g., Smith, 1919). One legacy of early work is scholars’ and practitioners’ tendency to conceptualize access as a social problem that is faced by lower status groups, such as poor people. Another legacy is a penchant for reducing, in a whole variety of ways, questions of justice to matters of law. Given this orienting framework, classical access to justice research focuses heavily on empirically documenting how law falls short of its supposed promise. At the same time, classical research often relied on an expansion of law – more or more affordable lawyers, more or more welcoming courts and hearing tribunals, wider participation on juries, new and better rights – as the policy solution to injustice or inequality.

This chapter investigates attributes of an unexplored actor in the contemporary industrial relations system – plaintiff-side employment attorneys – and the premise that pre-dispute mandatory employment arbitration expands employee access to justice.

It presents data from a novel survey of 1,256 employment plaintiff attorneys and the universe of employment disputes administered by the five largest arbitration providers in the United States.

I report multiple measures indicating employment lawyers hold negative views of arbitration and that arbitration acts as a barrier to employee access to justice: A majority of attorneys say employment arbitration clauses have a positive impact on their willingness to reject a case for representation and a negative impact on their willingness to accept a client under a contingency-fee arrangement, and report negative perceptions of the fairness of outcomes and the adequacy of due process protections in arbitration relative to litigation. Furthermore, attorneys report accepting potential clients covered by arbitration agreements at half the rate of potential clients able to sue in court. Finally, arbitration and litigation filing statistics reveal no evidence that low-income or low-value claimants or claims are accessing the arbitration forum.

Novel data compiled here illuminate the institutional characteristics of plaintiff-side employment lawyers and the arbitration forum. They question the assertion that arbitration is an accessible dispute resolution forum for employment disputes relative to civil litigation.