【作者】埃贝尔,R.L.
【内容提要】
Civil legal aid has displayed phenomenal growth in the last three decades. Britain was the first nation to accept it as a governmental responsibility in 1949, followed by the Netherlands in 1957, and then by other leading capitalist states, including the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, France, Sweden, Finland, and Germany. During the 1960's and the 1970's, budgets often doubled from year to year. Yet a number of states in the capitalist world make only the most rudimentary provisions for civil representation of indigents for instance, Italy, Spain, Japan, and Belgium. And even those countries most enthusiastic about their programs have seen outlays stagnate or fall in recent years. What explains both the rise and the decline of legal aid? What does it signify for the improvement of procedural justice, the legitimacy of the legal system, the promotion of social justice, the amelioration of class oppression, racism and sexism, and the advancement of political democracy?
These questions have attracted much scholarly attention. Several recent books provide extensive case studies of particular legal aid offices, histories and surveys of national legal aid programs, and comparative and theoretical reflections. Indeed, scholars may have devoted excessive attention to legal aid, which nowhere represents more than a tenth of the total national expenditure on legal services and rarely more than one percent. But if some of the reasons for this overemphasis are well known-the preference for studying down rather than up and the liberal politics of many legal scholar.
This Article, though originally stimulated by the appearance of the books cited above,uses a wide variety of other sources in an attempt to explore the following questions. How adequate are the prevailing accounts of legal aid? What criteria do they use to assess legal aid programs? What are the inte