Procedural Access to Justice Sample Clauses

Procedural Access to Justice. The term “access to justice” was popularised in the late 1970s by, amongst other things, the seminal Florence Access to Justice Project, which undertook an extensive comparative study of access to justice in twenty-three nations. According to Xxxxxxxxxxx, the editor of the study, “access to justice” encompassed a number of elements including procedural representation for “diffuse” interests, such as environmental protection. Procedural representation of environmental interests was a problem in many jurisdictions because traditional standing rules only recognised interests of a private, personal nature. A person could thus only initiate a legal action if his or her personal interests had been directly compromised by the action in question. Environmental issues, being matters of public interest, fell outside the scope of such ‘private’ interests and thus remained unrepresented within the legal system. Reformation of traditional ‘standing’ rules to facilitate representation of environmental interests became the subject of considerable academic debate following Xxxxxx Xxxxx’x influential treatise entitled “Should Trees have Standing?”.33 Whilst the notion of environmental standing have on occaison been criticised by some jurists as ambiguous, unrealistic and potentially wasteful or counterproductive34, broader rights of standing ‘caught on’ in the context of a growing global environmental movement and have now been established in a diverse range of jurisdictions. In the United States, for instance, citizen suit provisions in both federal and state law have enabled a considerable number of environmental organisations to utilise the courts for the 32 This section draws upon the discussion of conditions for effective environmental public interest law in Robinson, "Public Interest Environmental Law- Commentary and Analysis."