The guides in this section help researchers, service providers, policy makers and others measure specific aspects of legal capability.
What is legal capability?
Legal capability is the capability to achieve fair outcomes to problems involving law. In simple terms, it comprises the knowledge, skills, attributes, and resources needed to deal with legal problems (everyday and extraordinary) as people progress from recognising issues, to seeking advice or information, to resolving them:
- Knowledge (e.g. about the law, rights, assistance, information, processes)
- Skills (e.g. recognition of issues, information literacy, communication, decision-making, problem solving and digital skills)
- Attributes (e.g. confidence and attitudes, self-awareness, persistence)
- Resources (e.g. money, time, social capital, availability and provision of assistance services and infrastructure).
You can find our full framework of all stages and elements which constitute legal capability in our Law… What is it Good For? report.
Legal capability is also central to our flagship Public Understanding of Law Survey which will be conducted in 2022.
Why does legal capability matter
Around the world and over many years, legal needs surveys have revealed that:
- not every person is equally likely to experience legal problems (Inequality of the incidence)
- not every person is equally able to access the assistance they need (Inequality of access to legal assistance)
- not every person is equally able to benefit from particular services (Inequality of benefits from legal assistance).
Diminished legal capability increases vulnerability to legal problems (incidence), drives choices in dealing (or not) with these problems (access to assistance) and determines the benefits taken from different types of service
Consequently, understanding legal capability is critical to form policy that supports better justice and makes access more equitable.
What difference will understanding legal capability make?
A better understanding of legal capability is essential if access to justice policy is going to be effective and take account of peoples’ diverse needs and capabilities, responding to the ways in which they think about and use law.
One size clearly does not fit all in access to justice policy. Understanding legal capability is key to taking the next step - finding the size and style of services that do fit in different circumstances.
Understanding legal capabilities can help to:
- See the different capabilities people have, how they vary and where resources and services can be targeted to address deficits
- Give insights into legal problem-solving, advice seeking and outcome - helping to tailor services effectively
- Think about the optimal type and intensity – or style - of legal service that different people might need to support their access to justice
- Determine whether services or interventions are operating well, and where improvements might be made
- Measure the impact of service interventions and strategies, building evidence on what is working well.
How do you measure legal capability?
Despite the importance of understanding legal capability, the development of relevant measures is recent.
Measuring different aspects of legal capability is not simple, and approaches will vary. Some things can be asked about directly - for example, specific skills associated with digital capability or functional literacy. Others can’t be observed directly (for example legal confidence or perceived accessibility of lawyers). This challenge can be addressed by constructing scales to tap into latent traits (in this case, aspects of legal capability) and luckily there is a whole field of study to help with this – psychometrics.
Psychometrics is concerned with the theory and method of measurement, and in particular, measuring things you can’t directly observe. As a result, it is crucial in helping to capture many domains of legal capability.
Tools for measuring legal capability
These guides cover what aspect of legal capability is being measured, which questions to ask, how to score and interpret responses, some background technical details and brief findings to date.
Further guides will be added as we develop, test, refine and validate new scales.
Guide to the Perceived Inaccessibility of Lawyers (PIL) Scale
A simple to administer 10-item scale designed to measure the extent to which people think of lawyers as inaccessible.
This scale can be used to measure perceived inaccessibility for specific cohorts, quantify differences between groups and assess the impact of interventions designed to improve perceptions.
For use in a range of research, evaluation and practical settings.
Guide to the Perceived Inaccessibility of Courts (PIC) Scale
A simple to administer 10-item scale designed to measure extent to which people think of courts as inaccessible.
This scale can be used to measure perceived inaccessibility for specific cohorts, quantify differences between groups and assess the impact of interventions designed to improve perceptions.
For use in a range of research, evaluation and practical settings.
Other legal capability resources
Below are links to a range of recent resources produced by VLF researchers and colleagues which explore legal capability. They include reports setting out technical details of scale development, contextualisation and use of measures, and broader theorising and practical discussion of legal capability.
Law… What is it Good For? How People see the Law, Lawyers and Courts in Australia
VLF report setting out findings from a major Australia-wide survey investigating foundational aspects of legal capability. Explored the extent to which people saw the law as relevant to everyday legal problems, how important they felt legal advice was, and accessible they perceived both courts and lawyers to be.
Justice and the Capability to Function in Society
Pascoe Pleasence and Nigel Balmer discuss the place of legal capability in the global tradition of legal needs surveys. They set out the importance of understanding legal capability in informing “bottom-up” access to justice policy.
Assessing Access to Justice: How Much “Legal” Do People Need and How Can We Know?
Hugh McDonald discusses how the shift to user-centric approaches to access to justice and legal needs requires a commensurate shift in the empirical methods and measures used to assess access to justice.
Reshaping Legal Assistance Services: Building on the Evidence Base
Pascoe Pleasence, Christine Coumarelos, Suzie Forell, and Hugh McDonald review evidence demonstrating how legal problem-solving is patterned by people’s circumstances and explore how the concept of legal capability helps explain research findings. They also discuss how legal assistance can be better matched to the legal needs and capability of diverse users.
Development of a General Legal Confidence Scale: A First Implementation of the Rasch Measurement Model in Empirical Legal Studies
Technical paper by Pascoe Pleasence and Nigel Balmer describing the development of the General Legal Confidence (GLC) Scale. Includes detailed guidance on the use of Rasch analysis to develop legal capability scales capturing latent constructs.
Legal Capability and Inaction for Legal Problems: Knowledge, Stress and Cost
Hugh McDonald and Julie People use Australian national legal needs survey data to examine how knowledge, stress and cost factors whether people take action in response to legal problems. The findings show how deficiencies in legal capability can manifest a ‘paralysing’ effect resulting in inaction.
Legal Need Surveys and Access to Justice
Report by Pascoe Pleasence, Nigel Balmer and Peter Chapman providing a framework for the conceptualisation, implementation and analysis of legal needs surveys, including discussion of legal capability.
Wrong about Rights: Public Knowledge of Key Areas of Consumer, Housing and Employment Law in England and Wales
Article by Pascoe Pleasence, Nigel Balmer and Catrina Denvir examining public knowledge of rights - a key dimension of capability - in key areas relating to consumer, housing and employment law.
Financial Capability Research in Australia
Roslyn Russell, Jozica Kutin and Tracey Marriner provide a snapshot of Australian research landscape on financial capability – a closely related field to legal capability.
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