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From the 1890s onwards, social reformers, volunteer lawyers, and politicians increasingly came to see access to affordable or free legal advice as a critical part of helping working-class people uphold their rights with landlords, employers, and retailers and, from the 1940s, with the welfare state. Whilst a state scheme was launched in 1949, it was never fully implemented and help from a lawyer remained out of the reach of many people.<i>Lawyers for the poor</i>is the first full-length study of the development of voluntary action and mutual schemes to make the law more accessible, and the pressure put on the legal profession and governments to bring in further reforms. It offers new insights of the role of access to the law in shaping ideas about citizenship and civil rights in the twentieth century.

This book examines the development of legal advice services in England, from their origins in Poor Mans Lawyer voluntary work in the 1890s, through the growth of mutual schemes and newspaper advice bureaux, and to the challenges of meeting the needs of socially-excluded groups in the post-war period.