HAMLYN - College of Social Sciences and International Studies ...

1. Justice and Access to Justice
It is a great honour to be invited to give the Hamlyn Lectures.
The roll of former lecturers in this series (including such names
as Denning, Devlin, Kahn-Freund, Glanville Williams and Scarman)
is a glittering array. To be asked to join such an illustrious
company is not only an honour, it is also a formidable challenge.
The fact that these lectures, the 51st in the series, are given in
the last days of the twentieth century is also pregnant with
overtones. I hope that the title for the series—The State of
Justice—has about it the appropriate aura of significance for so
portentous a moment in time.
I am delighted that it has been possible to arrange for all four
lectures to be given here at the London School of Economics and
I thank the School and the Law Department for this courtesy. I
am also most honoured that this lecture should be chaired by
Lord Browne-Wilkinson, the senior law lord.
The subject embraced by the title for the series "The State of
Justice" is so vast that four lectures can do no more than scratch
the surface. However broad the brush one cannot even touch
on, let alone treat, every relevant topic. My aim in each lecture
has been to focus on as many as possible of the most important
issues. But I am very conscious that for reasons of space or for
lack of competence (or both) there are major issues that I do not
address at all. (In this lecture, for instance, I say nothing on the
important issue of quality of legal services; in my lecture on
criminal justice I say nothing about the race question or victims
or the penal system.)
There are those who believe that the British justice system is
the best in the world—and for all I know it may be. But I have
always resisted the temptation to make such a global statement
about our system in comparison with others because I find it
impossible to evaluate our system as a whole much less everyone
else's. A legal system has an infinite number of working