News

Congratulations to CJC member Divya Sukumar who won the Warwick Three Minute Thesis® competition during the live final last night (7 June)!

Divya's presentation got the highest score from a panel of specially appointed judges drawn from senior University staff and an external guest judge. She also won the People’s Choice Award from the audience. She now gets the chance to enter the national 3MT competition.

Congratulations to Melissa Colloff and Divya Sukumar for winning the 2016 Psychology Student Publication Awards! The awards worth of £100 were announced and presented on Friday 19 May, during the closing session of the Psychology Postgraduate Research Day. Melissa is supervised by Kim Wade and Divya is jointly supervised by Kim Wade and Jackie Hodgson.

This is what the judging panel said about the award-winning publications:

Colloff, M. F., Wade, K. A., & Strange, D. (2016). Unfair lineups make witnesses more likely to confuse innocent and guilty suspects. Psychological Science, 27(9), 1227-1239.

"The study used a sophisticated and careful experimental design to examine an important real life issue from a theoretical perspective. An impressively large sample size gives more strength to the study's results which potentially will have important practical implications for improving the lineup construction practices in the police force."

Sukumar, D., Hodgson, J. S., & Wade, K. A. (2016). Behind closed doors: Live observations of current police station disclosure practices and lawyer-client consultations. Criminal Law Review, 12, 900-914.

Jackie Hodgson will give a paper at a workshop jointly organised by the Cardiff Centre for Crime, Law and Justice and the Cardiff Centre of Law and Society. The workshop on 'Best practice in security and justice: from cross-cultural description and explanation to transnational prescription?’ will take place on 15-16 May 2017.

To seek to further our understanding of the challenges of learning cross-culturally in relation to security and justice by examining whether - and if so how - one can usefully and validly define transnational ‘good practice.’ The workshop aims to draw on the experiences of eminent cross-cultural researchers in a range of areas such as youth justice, defence rights and lawyering, urban security, policing and crime prevention more broadly.

Jackie will present a paper on 'People or Procedures? Securing effective defence rights across legal cultures', building on research conducted on defence lawyers and the challenges of moving towards universal standards in relation to the scope, nature and quality of custodial legal assistance.

Further detail is available on Cardiff University's website: http://sites.cardiff.ac.uk/events/view/best-practice-in-security-and-justice-from-cross-cultural-description-and-explanation-to-transnational-prescription/

The Open Society Initiative for Europe has published a call for proposals on Improving Police/Public Relations and Police Diversity.

The call for proposals is available here and more details on their website.

Prof Jackie Hodgson and Asher Flynn from Monash have a new edited collection on 'Access to Justice and Legal Aid: Comparative Perspectives on Unmet Legal Need' published by Hart.

This book considers how access to justice is affected by restrictions to legal aid budgets and increasingly prescriptive service guidelines.

As common law jurisdictions, England and Wales, and Australia, share similar ideals, policies and practices, but they differ in aspects of their legal and political culture, in the nature of the communities they serve and in their approaches to providing access to justice. These jurisdictions thus provide us with different perspectives on what constitutes justice and how we might seek to overcome the burgeoning crisis in unmet legal need.

The book fills an important gap in existing scholarship as the first to bring together new empirical and theoretical knowledge examining different responses to legal aid crises both in the domestic and comparative contexts, across criminal, civil and family law. It achieves this by examining the broader social, political, legal, health and welfare impacts of legal aid cuts and prescriptive service guidelines. Across both jurisdictions, this work suggests that it is the most vulnerable groups who lose out in the way that law is now done in the 21st century.

The book is essential reading for all those interested in access to justice and legal aid.