 |
Lee Bridges |
Professor Lee Bridges is Chair or the School of Law at the University of Warwick in England. He was also (until April 2003) Director of the Legal Research Institute at the University of Warwick. Trained as a political scientist, he has been involved in empirical research on legal services in England for over 30 years. This has included work on civil legal aid and public interest law, and from 1991 to 1994 he was Research Director of the Public Law Project in London where he conducted several large-scale studies of access to and the use of judicial review. A major focus of his research over the past 25 years has been on criminal defence services and criminal legal aid. He conducted a major study of the effectiveness of magistrates' court duty solicitor schemes and worked closely with the then Legal Aid Board in establishing the statutory magistrates' courts duty solicitor scheme in 1982. He also conducted the pilot research for the establishment of the police station duty solicitor scheme in 1986. He has subsequently been closely involved in a series of studies monitoring the work and quality standards of duty solicitors and criminal defence lawyers.
He is a co-author of Standing Accused: The Organisation and Practices of Criminal Defence Lawyers in Britain (Clarendon Press, 1994) and co-editor of Criminal Justice in Crisis (Edward Elgar, 1994). Since the mid-1990s, he has directed major evaluations of the accreditation scheme for non-lawyer police station representatives (Improving Police Station Legal Advice, Law Society and Legal Aid Board, 1998) and of the pilot for contracting criminal legal aid across England and Wales (Work Patterns and Costs under Criminal Contracting and Quality in Criminal Defence Services, Legal Services Commission, 2000). He is currently co-directing (with Avrom Sherr) the evaluation of the pilot Public Defender Services in England and Wales. As a member of the Lord Chancellor's Advisory Committee on Legal Education and Conduct (1994-1999) and of the Legal Services Consultative Panel (2000-2001), he has also been closely involved in the reform of rights of audience.