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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Understanding legal capability
Legal capability is the capability to achieve fair outcomes to problems involving law.
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.
Understanding and Capability is now available
Explore the knowledge, skills and attributes that are required to effectively understand and use the law.