CrowdJustice was born from the realisation that not only is it too expensive for most people to access the legal system, but also that many people want to participate in the law and don’t have an outlet or a means to do so. Bringing those two sides of a legal story together is the powerful mechanism that CrowdJustice provides.
Five cases that have been funded on CrowdJustice have reached the Supreme Court and many more the Court of Appeal, changing the law on areas from cohabitation rights, to the rights of heterosexual couples to enter into civil partnerships, to whistleblowing rights for junior doctors, to ensuring Parliament had the right to trigger Article 50. Hundreds of thousands of backers have – often for the first time – had an opportunity to engage with legal issues in a powerful and meaningful way.
One of the core tenets of CrowdJustice is that it is not for our technology or our team (ex-lawyers though we may be), to be the arbiter of what is a “good”, “bad”, “just” or “unjust” case. Instead, we put rigorous safeguards in place, such as independently verifying that a lawyer has been instructed in relation to the person at hand, and ensuring that funds raised go directly to the lawyer’s client account (requiring a high level of due diligence of funds). Lawyers are bound by high ethical and regulatory standards not to take on frivolous cases and to act in the best interest of their client and likewise, to serve the courts. Unlike any other platform, CrowdJustice does its best to ensure that anyone raising for a legal matter has real representation and, win or lose, will get a real shot at justice.
Not everyone will agree with all cases. Not everyone will support all cases. It’s paramount to the integrity of a platform that enables access to justice that we are a conduit to the courts, but that we do not serve as the court ourselves. We enable individuals and groups not only to access the law and legal services through funding, but also by having a platform, to raise awareness of issues, to create a public discourse around the law.
Sometimes that discourse is heated. This week, Darren Grimes, the 22-year-old Brexit campaigner launched a crowdfunding campaign on CrowdJustice to appeal a penal “final notice” issued by the Electoral Commission for alleged Brexit irregularities. He argues the decision, as his lawyers state in an update posted on his case page, “wrong in law [and] wrong in fact.”
CrowdJustice has also hosted the successful Supreme Court Article 50 Brexit challenge; the challenge of Professor David Carroll who was well ahead of the curve on challenging Cambridge Analytica under UK data protection laws and a host of other cases raising funds to get important legal issues regarding Brexit heard before the courts.
Our mission is to increase access to justice for everyone, no matter what their political beliefs, as long as a lawyer has taken on the legal matter. We hope you will join us – explore the cases you care about, start a conversation about the law if it’s a case you don’t agree with, or try to see the law in a different way – whether as a human story, a tool to change the world, or a critical part of our social fabric that should be accessible to everyone.
Photo Credit: The Guardian