Bridgette Toy-Cronin’s research while affiliated with University of Otago and other places

The phrase “people-centred justice” is a powerful rallying idea for improving access to justice. But what does it mean? While it is attractively simple, its openness means reformers can subsume a number of very different aims under its banner. Using various examples from New Zealand, where it has featured in domestic policy since 2012, this article considers three aspects of people-centred justice that mean it is open to various interpretations: conceptions of people (as legal actors, people with needs broader than law, people connected to communities); tensions between the needs of various people; and the role of representatives of people in people-centred justice. It argues that as people-centred justice comes of age, attention needs to be paid to refining its meaning. It must remain thoughtfully anchored to its original goals and its complexities need to be recognised and attended to if it is to realise its promise as a focus for access to justice reform.

Litigants in person (LiPs) are increasingly prominent players in the social world of the court. There is a growing literature addressing many questions relating to litigants in person and this article contributes to that literature, exploring the creation and maintenance of the social role of the litigant in person. I argue that the high-status actors and those in the inner circle of the social world of the court – the judiciary, lawyers, and court staff – engage in boundary work, defining the role of the litigant in person. In carrying out this work they shape two roles for the litigant in person: the vulnerable and the vexatious. Simultaneously they maintain the fiction that the ideal litigant in person is one who performs the lawyer's role. This role is neither possible nor desired by the high-status actors; litigants in person must remain differentiated. If court reform to address the challenges presented by litigants in person is to succeed, it must account for these role dynamics.

This paper reflects on the influences and outcomes of He Kāinga Oranga/Housing and Health Research Programme over 25 years, and their impact on housing and health policy in Aotearoa and internationally. Working in partnership particularly with Māori and Pasifika communities, we have conducted randomised control trials which have shown the health and broad co-benefits of retrofitted insulation, heating and remediation of home hazards, which have underpinned government policy in the Warm Up NZ-Heat Smart programme and the Healthy Homes Standards for rental housing. These trials have been included as evidence in the WHO Housing and Health Guidelines and led to our designation as a WHO Collaborating Centre on Housing and Wellbeing. We are increasingly explicitly weaving Māori frameworks, values and processes with traditional Western science.

Courts around the world moved rapidly to adopt remote hearings as the Covid-19 pandemic took hold. This accelerated a trend that pre-dated the pandemic, as governments and courts looked to remote hearings for their potential cost savings and the promise of greater accessibility. The debate about remote hearings has focused on using audio-visual technology, but audio-only hearings are widely used and involve the much more accessible technology, the telephone. Can an effective hearing (a key component of access to justice) be delivered by telephone? Drawing on a study of the New Zealand housing court, this article considers the benefits and problems for tenants – unrepresented and often vulnerable participants – when using audio-only hearings. It concludes that audio-hearings do offer the potential for greater access to justice as long as these hearings include adequate preparation, access to information, and support for the tenants.

There is a contradiction at the centre of tenancy practice and policy. On the one hand is the goal of sustaining tenancies to prevent homelessness and, on the other, a tribunal system for resolving tenancy disputes which is founded on achieving a "swift eviction". We analyse observations of tribunal hearings and mediations along with a sample of written orders. We ask whether the goal of sustaining tenancies can be achieved in a legislative framework originally intended to achieve swift eviction. We find that mediation creates space for determining a plan to pay off arrears but with little assurance the payments are accurate and realistic. Tribunal hearings for rent arrears allow limited discretion for continuing the tenancy, but even this discretion is restricted in practice. We conclude that there is a need to shift from "swift eviction" to recognising rent arrears as a consequence of poverty – one that requires support and intervention. While legislative change would support this shift, there is scope for significant improvement via process changes that borrow from the problem-solving approach of Te Ao Mārama.

Governments are turning to online self-help courts in an effort to cut costs, increase access to the justice system, and, in response to the global pandemic, to reduce physical contact. But to what extent do these courts support pro se or self-represented litigants? This article reports a laboratory experiment which compared how laypeople (pro se) and lawyers explained the same justiciable problem in a mock online court portal. Retired judges also evaluated a subset of blinded claims and provided opinions on their quality. The study found that the overall quality of laypeople’s claiming was lower than lawyers but there were outliers: both high-quality lay-filed claims and low-quality lawyer-filed claims. Laypeople were not as good at reporting legally salient details and showed confusion about corporate responsibility. When laypeople did report legally salient detail, they sometimes did so without a clear purpose or did so unclearly, confusing the reader. The quality of lawyer-filed claims varied and some created overly complex claims that would be uneconomic to litigate. We suggest that designers of online courts can use the evidence from this experiment, and future research like it, to build interfaces that will assist pro se or self-represented to more clearly explain their disputes.

The unaffordability of legal assistance is a widespread problem in New Zealand, as it is in many other common law countries. One way legal assistance is made more accessible is by lawyers offering discounting and payment plans. There is very limited research about how these practices operate and whether they are effective at delivering services to people in need. This article reports the results of a mixed-methods study to investigate New Zealand lawyers’ attitudes to these services, the extent to which they offered them, and how they were structured. The data showed that most lawyers offered discounts and payment plans. The decision to offer these services was generally made on a case-by-case basis and to clients who individual lawyers, in their discretion, considered worthy cases. The amount of the discount was often benchmarked to the legal aid rate but this could still put legal fees out of reach for many clients. While payment plans could offer liquidity for clients to access justice, they could also be problematic, drawing clients into long term debt. Starting with the client’s budget and determining legal fees from that starting point delivers more affordable legal services than the emphasis on discounting and payment plans.

This article examines the use of the term ‘customer’ in the justice system. It recognises that while the use of the term is designed to encourage ministry staff to focus on citizens’ needs, deploying a consumerist concept creates several fundamental problems in the context of the courts: it creates the impression that courts are a private rather than a public good; risks undermining neutrality and independence in the courts; and disguises and misrepresents the true nature of the interaction between the courts and citizens. The article concludes by suggesting a new way to meet the aims of ‘customer service’ while also protecting the independence and neutrality of the courts, by adopting manaakitanga and kaitiakitanga as guiding principles.