28-40
Free Legal Aid System and Its Changes vis a vis Law School Legal Clinics – A Missed Opportunity for Much Needed Synergy?
Authors: Iwo Jarosz
Number of views: 61
The steady growth of the body of legal provisions and law’s significance in our modern, highly juridified and often over-regulated societies, renders the issues of free legal aid and legal awareness vital and always up-to-date. These issues then capture the attention of political factors and result in legislative action. An example of a regulation of free legal aid is the polish act on free legal aid, free civic counselling and legal education. The system of free legal aid created by this act is currently in its sixth year of operation, this itself a success worthy of appraisal. However, the system is burdened with certain flaws as to its operation and the status of persons active within it. The gravest inadequacy of the system, however, is that it failed to, even partly, include within it the pre-existing system of existing law school clinics in Poland, which have for years succeeded in coupling legal education (both of the participating students as well as of the public) with free legal aid offered to those who cannot bear the costs of professional legal services. This missed opportunity for synergistic operation of both systems has no good justification. The text employs the following legal research methods to critically analyse the shape of the free legal aid regulation currently in force in Poland, as well as how the regulation completely omitted the existing system of clinical legal education programs at Polish law schools: formal-dogmatic method, comparative method, historical method, sociological methods.