Events

Debating Equal Justice: Fair Legal Systems in an Unfair World

Hosted by the Department of Law

Wolfson Theatre

Speakers

Baroness Shami Chakrabarti

Shadow Attorney-General, barrister, human rights activist and a Visiting Professor, LSE

Sir Ernest Ryder

Senior President of Tribunals

Frederick Wilmot-Smith

Barrister, Brick Court Chambers and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford

Chair

Professor Nicola Lacey

School Professor of Law, Gender and Social Policy, LSE

 

For this event the LSE Department of Law welcomes guest speakers including, Baroness Shami Chakrabarti, Sir Ernest Ryder and Frederick Wilmot-Smith to discuss the concept of equal justice and other issues raised in Frederick Wilmot-Smith’s recently published manuscript, Equal Justice (Harvard University Press 2019).

Should your risk of wrongful conviction depend on your wealth? We wouldn’t dream of passing a law to that effect, but our legal system, which permits the rich to buy the best lawyers, enables wealth to affect legal outcomes. Clearly justice depends not only on the substance of laws but also on the system that administers them.

In Equal Justice, Frederick Wilmot-Smith offers an account of a topic neglected in theory and undermined in practice: justice in legal institutions. He argues that the benefits and burdens of legal systems should be shared equally and that divergences from equality must issue from a fair procedure. He also considers how the ideal of equal justice might be made a reality. Least controversially, legal resources must sometimes be granted to those who cannot afford them. More radically, we may need to rethink the centrality of the market to legal systems. Markets in legal resources entrench preexisting inequalities, allocate injustice to those without means, and enable the rich to escape the law’s demands. None of this can be justified. Many people think that markets in health care are unjust; it may be time to think of legal services in the same way.

About the speakers 

Baroness Shami Chakrabarti CBE, PC, is Shadow Attorney-General, a barrister, human rights activist and a Visiting Professor with the LSE Department of Law.

Sir Ernest Ryder became Senior President of Tribunals in September 2015.

Frederick Wilmot-Smith is a Barrister at Brick Court Chambers and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.

About the Chair

 Professor Nicola Lacey is School Professor of Law, Gender and Social Policy at LSE.

About the LSE Department of Law

The LSE Law Department (@LSELaw) is one of the world’s best law schools. The department ranked first for research outputs in the UK's most recent Research Excellence Framework (REF 2014) and was in the top 5 law departments overall in the 2018 Complete University Guide. Our staff play a major role in helping to shape policy debates, and in the education of current and future lawyers and legal scholars from around the world.

 

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