Self-Represented Litigation and Meaningful Access to Justice in Aotearoa and Samoa
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Journal Article
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SAGE Publications
Abstract
More than a decade ago, the first exploratory study into the experiences of Self-Represented Litigants in Aotearoa (New Zealand) recommended the need for more cultural perspectives in this area of research. This article makes a timely contribution to building this knowledge base while identifying some of the gaps, attitudes, intersectional experiences and challenges faced by Pacific communities within their respective cross-cultural contexts in response to Aotearoa’s justice system. As a starting point, we explore the existing framework of self-represented litigation in Aotearoa as well as some of the key limitations to highlight how responsive it is to cultural and systemic issues of bias. This article further explicates key principles from a customary approach used in Samoa to demonstrate how it may help facilitate meaningful engagement across diasporic Pan-Pacific communities to further enhance cross-cultural litigation in the civil justice system of Aotearoa—a largely under-theorised area.Description
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AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, ISSN: 1177-1801 (Print); 1174-1740 (Online), SAGE Publications, 19(1), 13-22. doi: 10.1177/11771801221145843
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© 2023 Sage Publications. Under Sage's Green Open Access policy, the Accepted Version of the article may be posted in the author's institutional repository and reuse is restricted to non-commercial and no derivative uses.