Brian Libgober (Northwestern Political Science) drills down on the well-known but critically important fact that the justice gap particularly afflicts communities of color. Libgober tours new research finding that African Americans face significant barriers in finding lawyers, perhaps because of anticipated decisional bias within the legal system. The result is a bracing reminder that the justice gap is rooted in much wider structures of racial inequality and a profit-oriented legal marketplace that systematically under-serves certain segments of the population. His work shows the urgency – and difficulty – of meaningful reform.

Natalie Byrom explains how the Legal Services Act 2007 (LSA 2007) aimed to reform legal services in England and Wales to enhance consumer protection and access to justice. However, its focus on professional titles and reserved activities created complexity and hindered innovation, especially for low-income individuals. Public funding cuts in 2013 worsened the situation, leading to increased self-representation and strain on the judiciary. In response, the Ministry of Justice and Senior Judiciary launched a £1.3bn digital reform in 2014 to modernize court operations. However, by 2023, only twenty-four out of forty-four projects were completed, with key initiatives like the Online Solutions Court abandoned due to delays and COVID-19 disruptions. In November 2023, a new vision proposed a public–private partnership for digital justice, leveraging technology to streamline processes and support from private sector services. This raises questions about market readiness, incentives for data sharing, and necessary regulatory adjustments to ensure fair access to justice. Addressing these challenges is crucial for improving legal service delivery and access to justice.

David Freeman Engstrom (Stanford) and Daniel B. Rodriguez (Northwestern) argue that current structure of American legal services regulation, known as “Our Bar Federalism,” is outdated. Fifty states maintain their own rules and regulatory apparatus for a legal profession and industry that are now national and multinational. This fragmented system is a key factor in the American civil justice system’s access-to-justice crisis, where restrictive state rules support the lawyers’ monopoly. With new legal services delivery models and AI, this scheme will seem increasingly provincial and retrograde. This chapter argues it’s time to rethink "Our Bar Federalism," and explore hybrid state-federal regulatory system.

Brexit was a great revealer in many respects. In relation to Northern Ireland, it revealed the almost invisible role that joint EU membership had played in providing a scaffold for the peace process in the province and in resolving a postcolonial conflict with cross-border dimensions. In addition to EU political support and in facilitating good relations between Ireland and the UK, joint membership of the single market and customs union, along with the Common Travel Area between the two jurisdictions, reduced the practical and symbolic effect of the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland. It was thus the functional effects of single market law which provided the context within which a postcolonial conflict with cross-border dimensions could be managed. Brexit, particularly of the ‘hard’ variety, threatened to reintroduce this border, undermining a key element of the peace process. The Ireland/Northern Ireland Protocol or Windsor Framework is an imperfect substitute which results in an extremely complex legal landscape of multiple interacting sources of law: a form of legal pluralism or even legal entanglement.

Guided by the question of why and how the Mediterranean Sea, the bond between Europe and its African empires, became a frontier, this chapter explores the formation of two separate migration regimes in Europe. One that is liberal for white migration of the European Communities; the other that is (unevenly) closed and concerns racialized migration of the post-imperial communities. Analysing a period from the 1940s to the late 1970s, this chapter uses archival material from national and European bureaucracies to establish the formation of differentiated mobility and social security regimes by means of international and EEC/EC law. The chapter shows how this process has happened gradually. European law initially recognized the coexistence of two ‘communities’ (one European, one postcolonial), within which the rules of free movement of workers and access to social rights for foreigners from postcolonial and European communities were (formally) equal. Later, national and European bureaucracies gradually established a double standard along racial lines, which became the norm in the 1970s. In so doing, European law has contributed to closing access to the wealth accumulated in the former colonial mainland countries to the racialized populations of the former colonies.

David Engstrom and Jess Lu (both Stanford Law) first show that an otherwise fast-growing and dynamic “legal tech” industry has not generated significant “direct-to-consumer” technologies designed to help self-represented litigants navigate a complex legal system. They then interrogate that puzzle: Why is it that better consumer legal tech hasn’t flourished? They ultimately settle on the idea that rule reforms alone may not stimulate high-scale, direct-to-consumer technology. Instead, other policy interventions may be necessary, including standardizing what is currently a checkerboard of court technology and data infrastructures. Perhaps more importantly, direct-to-consumer legal tech may have trouble overcoming some of the problems that are inherent to markets that are attempting to serve individuals with episodic attachment to the civil justice system and limited ability to pay. The result is an important meditation on whether reforms to UPL, Rule 5.4, or something else entirely are necessary to unlock the potential of potent new technologies in order to narrow the justice gap.

This chapter outlines the colonial history of the CFA franc, and how to transition to a new currency, the eco, in West Africa. The CFA franc currently circulates in fourteen African countries divided into two monetary zones in West and Central Africa and this chapter starts by explaining the role currently played by the European Union institutions and the French Treasury in the currency’s governance in West Africa. The chapter goes on to discuss the different positions within the debate about how to transition to the eco and ends by outlining the most appealing roadmap for currency reform and monetary sovereignty in the West African region.