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13 Int'l J. Legal Prof. 1 (2006)

handle is hein.journals/injlepro13 and id is 1 raw text is: INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE LEGAL PROFESSION, Routledge VOL. 13, NO. 1, MARCH 2006 Editorial FRANCIs REGAN & TAMARA GORIELY Legal aid scholarship generally focuses on a relatively narrow range of issues. Much of the literature either describes national schemes, or examines recent reforms, or discusses empirical research into the effectiveness of legal services. There are many detailed accounts of eligibility provisions, and various criticisms and defences of government policy, but there are far fewer discussions of how and why governments introduce legal aid schemes and what they intend such schemes to achieve. There is more to legal aid scholarship than this narrow range of concerns. In this edition of the journal we focus on the often-overlooked historical development of national legal aid schemes. Historical legal aid research is by any measure under researched and published. In this edition of the journal we have focussed in particular on two gaps in the historical research. The first group of papers examine histories of some national legal aid schemes that have received no or very little attention in the literature. Steven Gibens examines the development of legal aid in Belgium, and Jon Johnsen discusses the emergence of legal aid in Norway. These papers go some way to completing the record of histories of national schemes. The second group of papers examines the development of more well-known national schemes, but focus upon specific episodes that have not received detailed attention in the literature. This group includes Tamara Goriely's discussion of why the Law Society in England and Wales clung tenaciously to the principle of gratuitous assistance from 1914 to 1939, Don Fleming and Francis Regan's re-examination of the rise and demise of the Australian Legal Aid Office in the 1970s, and Ab Currie's ongoing examination of the debates over federal funding of legal aid in Canada. These papers demonstrate that legal aid is a much more complex and interesting phenomenon than some of the literature suggests. It emerges in different places at different times, for a variety of acknowledged and unacknowledged reasons, and its development is often punctuated by episodes of intense political debate. No scheme is free from its historical legacy, and from the often conflicting expectations that it carries with it. ISSN 0969-5958 print/ISSN 1469-9257 online/06/010001-1 ( 2006 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/09695950600799487