Nigel Balmer

Victoria Law Foundation

Download the report here: https://victorialawfoundation.org.au/research/research-reports/working-in-community-legal-centres-in-victoria-the-role-of-legal-education This report explores how legal education prepared people for working in the community legal sector and is one of a series of reports from the Community Legal Centres Workforce Project...

Kutin, J. J., McDonald, H. M., Hagland, T., Kennedy, C. L., & Balmer, N. J. (2022). Working in community legal centres in Victoria. Results from the Community Legal Centres Workforce Project: COVID-19 experiences and lessons. https://victorialawfoundation.org.au/research/research-reports/working-in-community-legal-centres-in-victoria-covid-19-exper...

https://victorialawfoundation.org.au/research/research-reports/working-in-community-legal-centres-in-victoria-workforce-profile/

This is the first report in the Foundation’s data mapping project. The project examines how administrative data is collected and used in the Victorian civil justice system. The project investigates what data is available, its accuracy and consistency, how data is used and what needs to be done to improve its ability to answer access to justice ques...

This report examines how administrative data is collected and used in the Victorian legal assistance sector justice system. It investigates what data is available, its accuracy and consistency, how data is used and what needs to be done to improve its ability to answer access to justice questions. Findings show that administrative data in the legal...

A review of legal needs surveys globally

The report draws on findings from our recently conducted Community Perspectives of Law Survey, an Australia-wide survey of over 1800 people which explored people’s understanding of the relevance of law and, in particular, whether lawyers are seen as important in relation to everyday scenarios. Those scenarios included the kinds of problems that ar...

The report draws on findings from our recently conducted Community Perspectives of Law Survey, an Australia-wide survey of over 1800 people which explored people’s understanding of the relevance of law and, in particular, whether lawyers are seen as important in relation to everyday scenarios. Those scenarios included the kinds of problems that ari...

Legal capability has long been of evident importance in our understanding of legal problem resolution behavior. Although legal capability remains a contested concept, there is much commonality between specifications. Some aspects are generic, while others—such as legal confidence—are particular to law. Such law‐specific measures as have been develo...

All over the world, civil legal problems are ubiquitous. But while all groups in every society that has been studied experience civil justice problems, these problems and their consequences do not fall equally. Socially disadvantaged people report more problems, more serious problems, and more negative consequences from them. The lack of legal capa...

While, in the UK, attitudes to the criminal justice system have been routinely investigated less effort has been made to measure attitudes to the civil justice system. However, globally, there are increasingly numerous examples of studies of attitudes to civil justice. Robust standardised scales are important to establishing change and difference b...

In England and Wales less than half of the adult population report that they have a will, with similarly low numbers found in other jurisdictions. Dying intestate can have profound implications on the family relationships, housing security, finances, employment, health and welfare of those who are left behind. Social policy initiatives designed to...

Over many decades, processes of juridification have brought about huge growth in legal rights, responsibilities and protections, yet citizens appear to poorly understand this ‘law thick’ world. This impacts citizens’ capacity to ‘name, blame and claim’ in the legal domain at a time of retreat from public funding of civil legal services. This articl...

Business owners sought advice to resolve business-related legal problems more often than other LAW Survey respondents. They also made greater use of legal advisers, financial advisers and trade/professional association advisers than individuals. Yet we know that business-related legal problems routinely result in adverse consequences and frequently...

Among LAW Survey respondents, 2,611 people (13%) described themselves as business owners. These business owners reported 984 business-related legal problems, 65 per cent of which resulted in adverse consequences (e.g. loss of income, illness or relationship breakdown). This not only impacted on business and the Australian economy, but also on busin...

New analysis of LAW Survey data has identified three distinct groups among business owners according to their likelihood of experiencing business-related and other types of legal problems ‒ ‘normal’, ‘highly elevated’ and ‘extreme’. As is the case with individuals, a relatively small proportion of business owners account for the bulk of problems. T...

This report provides the background and methods to the development off a series of standardised measures of legal confidence and attitudes to law. To date, measures in the field of legal capability have been developed in an ad-hoc fashion, with no attempt to test the psychometric properties of scales, using either classical test theory or modern ps...

This report sets out the baseline general population scores, along with details of the social and experience based patterning of scores, for five standardised measures of legal confidence and attitudes to law recently developed by the authors under a grant from the Legal Education Foundation. The measures are the General Legal Confidence (GLC), the...

Since the mid-1990s, at least 28 large-scale national surveys of the public's experience of justiciable problems have been conducted in at least 15 separate jurisdictions, reflecting widespread legal aid reform activity. While the majority of these surveys take their structure from Genn's Paths to Justice survey (1999), they vary significantly in l...

As law has become increasingly ubiquitous in modern life, the sources of help to deal with an increasing range of legal issues have become more fragmented and complex. Yet, despite the ubiquity of law and scale of the (broadly defined) legal services sector, there is evidence in England and Wales that public awareness of even the most prominent ser...

Maintaining participant engagement in longitudinal surveys has been a key focus of survey research, and has implications for the quality of response and cost of administration. This paper presents new research measuring the impact of the design of between-wave keeping-in-touch mailings on response to the mailing and subsequent wave of a longitudina...

At the time of the 2011 Census, 8.3 million (or 36 per cent) of households in England and Wales were rented. Thus, the ability of individual citizens to resolve legal problems related to rented housing is a matter of broad societal importance. Looking at the English and Welsh Civil and Social Justice Panel Survey (CSJPS), renting housing problems w...

This report presents findings from new analysis of English and Welsh Civil and Social Justice Panel Survey (CSJPS) data, of the relationship between mental illness and social disadvantage among young people, with a particular focus on the experience of those facing legal issues. Our findings indicate that while young people, in general, are least l...

Introduction Many sporting events are viewed on television or other visual media, and away from the actual competition. Understanding factors that impact on spectators’ views of officials’ decisions is important for a number of stakeholders in sports including athletes, coaches, officials, promoters and media companies. There have been limited stud...

Key Findings Courts and law are peripheral to everyday justice. • Fewer than one in ten people experiencing legal problems instruct solicitors • Consumer experience does not mirror traditional legal services distinctions including reserved activities • Deficiencies in the civil justice system in meeting consumers’ needs are largely due to difficult...

As an increasing number of Government services have moved away from traditional modes of provision to online formats, there has been a corresponding need to ensure greater access to the internet. Although older people (those over 60) are least likely of all age groups to have access to the internet in their homes, the internet holds much potential...

Background: Muay Thai is a combat sport growing in international popularity. Previous research has highlighted marked jurisdictional differences in the judging systems employed, but no studies have compared techniques used by fighters across geographic regions or have been on how these might be a function of the different judging systems employed....

In line with changes to the delivery of other public services, current reforms to publicly funded legal advice services within England and Wales seek to move services from traditional face-to-face settings to delivery predominantly over the telephone. Government justification for the policy has focused on greater equality of access. In contrast, cr...

Over the last two decades, the public sector has embraced new modes of service delivery, moving away from traditional face-to-face provision towards internet and telephone-based advice and information. While telephone provision now plays an increasingly significant role in overall provision of legal advice, there has been little empirical research...

This book reviews the methods and findings of legal needs studies in 14 countries.

Public knowledge of rights has been the subject of a number of empirical enquiries over the last decade. In England and Wales, knowledge of rights and its relationship with an individual's capacity to ‘self-help’ and ‘self-represent’ when faced with a civil justice problem has become the subject of renewed attention following changes to legal aid w...

Recession and structural changes to the market for legal services are combining to create a turbulent environment for the solicitors’ profession. The recession has had a significant impact on demand for legal services. Changing fee structures, increased competition, changes to ownership rules and the introduction of new technologies are providing c...

The ability of people to protect their legal rights and hold others to their legal responsibilities is a prerequisite of the rule of law and underpins social justice. The English and Welsh Civil and Social Justice Panel Survey (CSJPS), which replaced the English and Welsh Civil and Social Justice Survey (CSJS) in 2010, provides the only large-scale...

This study is based on a statistical analysis of police custody records. We earlier examined the take-up of legal advice and now turn our attention to the time people spend in police custody. We find that the average time people are detained seems to have risen over recent years and that a number of factors can impact on the length of detention, in...

Numerous factors have been proposed to explain the home advantage in sport. Several authors have suggested that a partisan home crowd enhances home advantage and that this is at least in part a consequence of their influence on officiating. However, while experimental studies examining this phenomenon have high levels of internal validity (since on...

The Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 will from April 2013 remove legal aid from many areas of private family law, with many vulnerable individuals expected to represent themselves. However, funding will be available via the Act’s ‘exceptional funding’ regime on a case by case basis where provision of legal aid is necessary...

In common with a number of other developed western states, the UK has seen significant growth of consumer debt over the past three decades. In tandem, there has been an associated increase on the demand for debt advice. Using data from the English and Welsh Civil and Social Justice Survey, this article explores how debt problems are experienced acr...

Previous studies have highlighted the paucity of knowledge possessed by people in a number of jurisdictions with regard to specific legal issues and processes, yet what has not been fully understood is the practical impact of this lack of knowledge. This paper looks at how knowledge of rights affects the resolution of civil justice problems. Data w...

We live our lives against an extensive backdrop of legal rights and responsibilities, yet a growing number of studies indicates low levels of public legal literacy. In the context of opposite-sex cohabitation and marriage law, this study employs new survey data from the United Kingdom to explore, in detail, how many and which people are ignorant of...

Over the last two decades the public sector has embraced new modes of service delivery, with a shift away from traditional face-to-face provision towards Internet and telephone based advice and information. While telephone provision has played an increasingly significant role in overall provision of legal advice in recent years, there has been limi...

The impact of the recent near-collapse of the world banking system continues to be felt within families, with many people facing employment, money and housing problems as a direct result. Using data from a UK household survey, this paper explores the relationship between recession-related ‘justiciable’ life problems and relationship stability. Arou...

The present study, using data from the English and Welsh Civil and Social Justice Survey, compares the characteristics of spouses and cohabitants, and aims to examine how relationship type influences the experience of civil law problems generally and problems associated with relationship breakdown in particular. Socio-economic differences between m...

When faced with a broad range of justiciable problems, people seek advice for around half of them, and advice from lawyers on around 13% of occasions. Various factors have been found to link to advice seeking behaviour, but it is commonly recognized that problem type ‘swamps’ other factors. This study draws on an Internet survey of 1,031 respondent...

A number of studies have pointed to a plateauing of athletic performance, with the suggestion that further improvements will need to be driven by revolutions in technology or technique. In the present study, we examine post-war men's Olympic performance in jumping events (pole vault, long jump, high jump, triple jump) to determine whether performan...

The Influence of Crowd Noise on Judging Sport Tony Myers and Nigel Balmer Introduction Home advantage has been established in a number of sports. Recent research has demonstrated that home advantage is particularly prominent in subjectively judged sports, with subjective officiating contributing at least in part to this (Balmer, Nevill & Williams...

Informed by data extracted from 30,921 police electronic custody records, drawn from 44 police stations across four police force areas and including 5153 records of juveniles aged 10 to 17 years, this article examines the take-up of legal advice by children and young people in police stations in England and Wales. There are wide variations in the e...

Internet use and access in the UK has increased rapidly in the last decade, with the concept of ‘information superhighway’ recognised as an axiom of Internet technology. Despite this, few studies have sought to investigate the incidence of use of the Internet as an advice resource outside of the health information arena. With an increasing impetus...

January 2011 marks the 25th anniversary of the introduction of the unequivocal right of police station detainees to obtain advice from a solicitor. However, while this right is a fundamental safeguard to procedural propriety, no large-scale investigation of the rates at which advice is requested or received has been undertaken in over a decade. Thi...

The ability of people to protect their legal rights and hold others to their legal responsibilities is a prerequisite of the rule of law and underpins social justice. The English and Welsh Civil and Social Justice Panel Survey (CSJPS), which replaced the English and Welsh Civil and Social Justice Survey (CSJS) in 2010, provides the only large-scale...

Psychiatric morbidity has been shown to be associated with the increased reporting of a range of social problems involving legal rights (‘rights problems’). Using a validated measure of psychiatric morbidity, this paper explores the relationship between psychiatric morbidity and rights problems and discusses the implications for the delivery of hea...

The 2008 recession presents a double challenge to legal aid. Unemployment extends legal aid eligibility. It is also associated with increased vulnerability to problems involving legal rights, feeding demand for legal services. Job loss, as distinct from unemployment, might be expected to increase vulnerability further still. In this paper, we set o...

People’s ability to use the law to protect their rights and hold others to their responsibilities is crucial to ensuring fairness before the law, bringing about social justice and addressing social exclusion. The ‘Continuous’ English and Welsh Civil and Social Justice Survey (CSJS), conducted between 2006 and 2009, examines this in detail. This rep...

The following report uses three years of data from the English and Welsh Civil and Social Justice Survey (CSJS), a face-to-face household survey of people’s experience of and response to rights problems, to examine respondents who reported problems associated with unmanageable debt and financial difficulty. The research was commissioned by the Mone...

Purpose: Concerns about expenditure on legal aid in England and Wales have led to greater focus on 'value for money' and increased strategic targeting of resources. To inform targeting, the English and Welsh Civil and Social Justice Survey has been used to investigate the relative severity of different civil justice problem types. Thus, the survey...

It is 90 years since legislation introduced a right for women to practice as solicitors in England and Wales, yet women still comprise just 24 per cent of partners in private practice. In this paper we employ data derived from Law Society reports from the past 22 years to model past and future growth of women’s participation in the solicitors’ prof...

Home advantage in the summer Olympic Games is well known. What is not so well known is that countries that host the Olympic Games perform better in the games before and after the games in which they were hosts. To model/quantify the significance associated with these "hosting" effects and to explain the likely causes of Great Britain's improved med...

As with general morbidity, psychiatric morbidity has been linked to an array of social problems, with interest in those links heightened by the noted vulnerability of those with mental illness and the cost of mental illness to the economy. Legal rights have a bearing upon many social problems. This study, based on data drawn from surveys of 2,628 a...

Despite limited research on access to advice services, it has long been assumed that access is related to geographic proximity [e.g. Blacksell, M., 1990. Social Justice and access to legal services: a geographic perspective. Geoforum 21 (4), 489–502]. The current study uses data from the English and Welsh Civil and Social Justice Survey, a large-sc...

A survey was undertaken of over 1,000 people drawn into the criminal justice system in order to find out more about their choice and use of a solicitor: 212 suspects interviewed in police stations, 767 in magistrates’ courts and 163 female prisoners. It was found that people value having a choice of a solicitor with 9 out of 10 respondents saying t...

Over recent years there has been increasing policy concern in the UK about whether citizens are equipped with sufficient legal ‘know-how’. In January 2006, the Department for Constitutional Affairs, now Ministry of Justice, announced a Public Legal Education and Support Task Force to develop and promote the case for a national strategy. This comes...

There is considerable evidence of links between social and health problems. Some of these links involve social problems that can be addressed through civil legal process, and may be described as civil-law problems. Various initiatives have been implemented around the world to link health and legal advice services to promote better health and justic...

Experience of civil justice problems has been shown to be linked to long-term illness or disability and more recently, specifically to mental health. Studies have also highlighted the potential for stress-related ill health to directly result from the experience of a range of civil justice problems. This study explores further the relationship betw...

A randomized trial was conducted to assess whether the offer of advice to those experiencing debt problems and who had yet to obtain any formal advice, had a positive impact on their financial and general circumstances. The participants were drawn from 16 Jobcentres (welfare offices) in 13 areas of England and Wales. In all, 402 participants were i...

Criminal justice processes target a limited range of ‘crimes’ or ‘harms’ to the exclusion of many others. Whilst political and public policy attention is often focused on procedures and processes, there is also great value in considering broader issues of social justice across a spectrum of activities that extend beyond the restricted scope of crim...

The incidence of problems involving rights is linked closely to social exclusion. We have shown previously that a part of this is that incidence is linked to long-term illness/disability. The prevalence of mental illness and associated public cost mean that potential links between rights problems and mental illness may be particularly pronounced. I...

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2007 University of South Alabama Recent experimental evidence suggests that the noise of a partisan home crowd may influence soccer officials to make an imbalance of decisions in favor of the home side (Nevill, Balmer, & Williams, 2002). The purpose of the present study was to test the notion that biased decisions in favor of t...

In Autumn 2004 the Department for Constitutional Affairs (DCA) commissioned the Legal Services Research Centre (LSRC) to investigate the broad impact of debt advice. The resulting Impact of Debt Advice Research Project looked to establish the impact of debt advice on people’s lives. The project involved four studies; a follow-up study of advice age...

BACKGROUND: Evidence of associations between social problems and morbidity supports a broad approach to service provision in general practice. Some social problems linked with morbidity involve people’s rights. They can be mitigated through the provision of advice about people’s rights. Without advice, people are often in a poor position to make in...

People’s ability to use the law to protect their rights and hold others to their responsibilities is crucial to bringing about social justice and addressing social exclusion. The English and Welsh Civil and Social Justice Survey (CSJS) examines this in detail. This report describes the main findings from the 2006 interviews for the English and Wels...