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Introduction

The question of legal aid and access to free and low-cost professional legal assistance has accompanied every major attempt at Russian legal reform since the mid-nineteenth century.

Both tsarist and Soviet officials wrestled with this issue and whether such help should be provided by lawyers through their independent corporate bodies or alternatively be delivered via state-controlled and/or state-supervised institutions. Moreover, this discussion persists to the current day, where who provides—and receives— qualified legal assistance remains a matter of public debate.

Legal aid turns out to be an important barometer by which to examine and understand Russia’s legal development past and present. It illuminates the professional aspirations of the bar and its commitment to public

W. E. Pomeranz (*)

Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute, Washington, D.C., USA

e-mail: william.pomeranz@wilsoncenter.org

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 29

Switzerland AG 2021

F. Batlan, M. Vasara-Aaltonen (eds.), Histories of legal Aid, World

Histories of Crime, Culture and Violence,

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80271-4_2

service. Such assistance further provides important insights into bottom- up demand for law and what sort of everyday legal disputes resonated with the Russian public and prompted them to consult with a qualified attor­ney. Finally, greater access to legal aid invariably implicates the state and how much legal assistance—and accompanying assertion of civil, social, and economic rights—Russia’s rulers are willing to tolerate.

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Source: Batlan Felice, Vasara-Aaltonen Marianne. Histories of Legal Aid: A Comparative and International Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan,2022. — 345 p.. 2022
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