In Part I of this guest post Dr Stephanie Pywell reflects on her experience as a litigant in person. The insights she offers will be particularly useful to OU students working on public-facing Open Justice projects such as the advice clinic, Citizens Advice and the Personal Support Unit. 

Part I

We are pleased to be able to publish a guest post ‘Lawyers in Government’ by James Coupe. James is a former OU law student and offers some comments on his experience studying law with the OU to give some additional background to his article.

Today’s post is by final year OU law students Lidia Dancu, Hannah Dowling, Ayesha Khurshid and Samina Nasir and reflects on their contribution to Open Justice Streetlaw worskhops in Scotland and Newcastle during March and April 2018.

What is the best test of your understanding of the law, if not the ability to explain its practical application to a roomful of teenagers?  Not just a roomful but an assembly kind of roomful – all of them perhaps more excited at the prospect of being able to skip Maths than a meeting with some wannabe lawyers.

In this series of blog posts, Paul Dale, an Associate Lecturer at The Open University, final year law students Jon Stitcher, Lucy Tomlinson and Sean Harker, and  ‘prisoner mentor’, Malcolm, reflect on their experiences of teaching public legal education in Her Majesty’s Prison Oakwood.

Paul

In this series of reflections, a number of Open University law students discuss their experiences delivering public legal education in HMP Wormwood Scrubs, which they visited along with law lecturers, Keren Lloyd Bright and Kate Richie. There were five visits in all, during which ‘Law and Society’ seminars were held within the prison’s Education Department. The topics for the seminars were chosen by the inside students (prisoners).

Our latest guest blog is provided by Angbeen Mirza, a lawyer and research based in Lahore, Pakistan. In it, Angbeen discusses her work conducting Street Law programmes in Lahore and discusses how Street Law programmes can be part of a wider social movement for change, which have particular resonance in an emergent democracy.

Our latest guest blog was contributed by Nick Titchener, Director & Solicitor-Advocate at the criminal defence solicitors firm Lawtons Law.

For many areas of legal practice, the concept of pro bono work is something altruistic, when the legal profession is giving something back, the provision of expertise, time and skills for nothing.

This guest blog is by Nabeela Siddiqui. She is pursuing her Master’s in Law from the Department of Legal Studies at University of Madras, India. She is also working on a project titled ‘Faith Based Organisations and Refugee Crisis’. Lately, she also interned at AALCO (Asian-African Legal Consultative Organization) and the Supreme Court of India. If you would be interesting in contributing a guest blog, please contact us at open-justice@open.ac.uk

Blog post by Francine Ryan, lecturer in law and member of the Open Justice team.

Students working on The OU’s Open Justice project will be aware that the availability of free legal advice and representation has become increasingly limited over recent years and, for those in need of legal services, the thought of self-funding the legal help they need can seem a particularly daunting prospect.