Legal Services in Fiji Part 1: Money from Nothing — Funding Legal Aid in the Pacific

Abstract

This is the first of a two-part In Brief series on legal services in Fiji, which draws on fieldwork and other data collected for my PhD thesis. It tells the little-publicised story of how Fiji’s Legal Aid Commission (LAC) has been able to grow from just three offices in 2005, staffed by a handful of employees and heavily reliant on donor funding, into a domestically funded world-class institution with more than 24 branches nationwide employing over 100 lawyers and providing legal advice to over 11,000 people each year across a range of family, criminal, and civil matters.