By Catrina Denvir, Jacqueline Kinghan, Jessica Mant, Daniel Newman

Legal aid lawyers provide a critical function in supporting individuals to address a range of problems. These are problems that commonly intersect with issues of social justice, including crime, homelessness, domestic violence, family breakdown and educational exclusion. However, the past few decades have seen a clear retreat from the tenets of the welfare state, including, as part of this, the reduced availability of legal aid. This book examines the impact of austerity and related policies on those at the coalface of the legal profession. It documents the current state of the sector as well as the social and economic factors that make working in the legal aid profession more challenging than ever before.

Through data collected via the Legal Aid Census 2021, the book is underpinned by the accounts of over 1000 current and former legal aid lawyers. These accounts offer a detailed demography and insight into the financial, cultural and other pressures forcing lawyers to give up publicly funded work. This book combines a mixture of quantitative and qualitative analysis, allowing readers a broad appreciation of trends in the legal aid profession.

This book will equip readers with a thorough knowledge of legal aid lawyers in England and Wales, and aims to stimulate debate as to the fate of access to justice and legal aid in the future.

London: Bloomsbury Academic/Hart, 2023. 304p.

ByNational Center for State Courts

A mindfulness program offered through a free, mobile app and weekly webinar meetings showed promise for increasing mindfulness and well-being and reducing stress among a convenience sample of individuals who work in and with courts. Because of the high attrition rates, common to these types of studies, the findings are promising but should be interpreted with caution. Additional research to build the evidence on mindfulness programs for the court community is encouraged. Among those who participated, feedback about the program was largely positive. Participants found the mobile app userfriendly and engaging, and the half-hour weekly webinars with a mindfulness instructor useful and engaging. Results suggest that building a judicial education mindfulness program around a mobile app is a cost-effective approach that is flexible to implement and helps some in the court community enhance their mindfulness and well-being and reduce their stress. Future mindfulness programs should include evaluations to further our knowledge on which features of the programs are of greatest benefit to participants and whether the programs are more likely to affect well-being and stress in distinct subsets of the court community

Williamsburg, VA: National Center for State Courts, 2023. 7p.

By Mary Pattillo and Gabriela Kirk

Economic sociologists have documented the rise of financialization, including credit and debt. In the case of monetary sanctions in the criminal legal system, courts frequently extend payment plans—or “layaway”—as a way for defendants to manage financial court debt and gain their freedom. Using 241 hours of courtroom ethnography and 155 interviews with court actors and people paying their court debt in Illinois, the authors offer a microsociology of financialization that shows how the creditor/debtor relationship commodifies freedom, confuses and suffuses court processes, amplifies control, and expands the financial sector into domains that obligate participation. Layaway freedom represents a case of coercive financialization, or the externally imposed, involuntary, or last-resort entry into financial engagements. The manipulation of money and time achieves disproportionate punishment that is multiplicative, rather than simply additive, all under the guise of routine financial responsibility. The authors discuss implications of these concepts for both economic and criminal-legal sociology

American Journal of Sociology, Volume 126 Number 4 (January 2021): 889–930

By M. Ralph Brown.

Psychology Apoplied to the Trial of Cases, to Crime and Its Treatment, and To Mental States and Processes, Indianapolis: “The aim of the author has been to collect and to explain within the covers of this small volume those principles of applied psychology which are of distinct benefit to the legal profession. Usefulness to the practicing lawyer has been the criterion upon which the inclusion or exclusion of material has been based. The field of applied legal psychology is at the present time almost an uncharted one. It is true that there are some few books, and a number of articles or chapters of books, upon this subject, yet on the whole they are so general in treatment, so difficult to obtain, or developed from some other angle than that of serving the lawyer in his work, that it was felt that a volume which would avoid these defects, and which would bring the subject down to date, would not be simply another volume on an old subject, but would be a really creative achievement.”

Bobbs-Merrill, 1926. 346p.