The merits of legal aid in the magistrates courts revisited

The study providing the data for this paper was commissioned in part due to policy makers’ concerns about inconsistency
between courts in the granting of legal aid. The research and this paper were undertaken equally by both authors. We identified
that a large part of the inconsistency resulted from different weight that decision-makers placed on the statutory criteria and that
this could be reduced by redesign of the criminal legal aid application form. Our recommendations were adopted, resulting in
redesign of these forms.