The Centre for Socio-Legal Studies is undertaking a ground-breaking four-year oral history project on the Law Centres movement. Funded by the AHRC since April 2021, the project aims to address the dearth of in-depth accounts of community lawyering in the UK. The project explores Law Centres’ work on legal cases, community projects, strategic litigation and social campaigns, and the wider social impacts of this work.
The project team at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies consists of the Principal Investigator, Professor Linda Mulcahy, Director of the Centre, and Dr Marie Burton, Senior Research Fellow, and former Law Centre solicitor. Also working on the project are Professor Kieran McEvoy and Professor Anna Bryson from Queens University, Belfast, who are responsible for research into Law Centres in Northern Ireland. The project team is working closely with the UK’s leading oral history fieldwork charity, National Life Stories to create a permanent sound archive of Law Centre voices at the British Library.
The Law Centres Network is a project partner and. Julie Bishop, Director of the Law Centres Network has commented:
“The Law Centres Network is delighted to be a partner on this project which will give much-needed recognition to the work that Law Centres have done in working with communities, enhancing access to justice and challenging unjust laws.”
The project will create a unique, in-depth account of the history of Law Centres from the perspective of those that were and are part of the movement.
The project team is collecting the personal testimony of individuals who have been connected with Law Centres over the years since 1970, from the activists who staffed the first Law Centres, right up to the present day. In due course, their interviews will be deposited at the British Library and become part of the National Life Stories: Legal Lives collection.
In addition to the production of a sound archive, the project team has created a paper archive of approximately 600 Law Centre annual reports and other Law Centre-related documents which is being deposited in the British Library Contemporary Archives and Manuscripts collection. This will give generations of future researchers access to a rich repository of images, statistics and stories about Law Centres and how the legal needs of the poor were re-conceptualised. This will be a significant and lasting resource for academics, journalists, lawyers and all those interested in active citizenship.
