Marking 40 years of community legal centres in Australia, this article examines CLCs long standing history of promoting rational criminal justice policies to counter punitive and populist law and order politics. It profiles Smart Justice which is creating a credible coalition to promote effective, humane and evidence-based criminal justice policies.

Traditional legal spaces are exclusive zones. Barristers’ chambers and solicitors’ offices have almost invariably been designed as private spaces that embody an imbalance of power between practitioners of law and clients. This article, which is informed by cultural geography theory and draws on the testimony of CLC workers, contends that CLCs have approached questions of dress, lawyer-client interactions and office structure in new ways that resist and transgress the spatial exclusion of typical legal places. However, consensus on how best to use space to foster community involvement and client empowerment has still not been reached.

Community legal centres are an accepted part of the Australian legal landscape, but this was not always the case. Early CLCs represented a marked shift away from established conceptions of the law, legal practice and legal practitioners. This article traces the factors underlying CLCs' achievements in challenging traditional conceptions and surviving in the long term. While acknowledging the importance of CLC workers' and volunteers' skills and tenacity, it argues that the social and political climate in which they originated was pivotal to CLCs' longevity.

Community legal centres have a justifiable sense that they were once a radical alternative to conventional lawyering, but that role is no more, and CLCs are now reformers within established legal structures. In this sense they are finished. The radical political theory of Thomas Mathiesen both explains what has happened to CLCs independence, and shows how things could be different in future if CLCs were to avoid making the choices that the state demands of them.

The future of CLCs hinges on how internal and external forces impact the things which matter most — the comparative strengths of CLCs. These strengths will be fully leveraged by CLCs only if they operate as highly effective and capable organizations, characterised by discipline. This imperative applies equally to existing CLCs and new initiatives that aspire to have real impact beyond service delivery and which animate a genuine justice dialogue.

Research supports the integration of legal services with health and welfare services. A recent project looked at work and practices of the West Heidelberg Community Legal Service which has been co-located with Banyule Community Health for thirty years.

Do Australian anti-discrimination laws need reformatting or reform? This article compares Australia’s laws with their equivalent in the United Kingdom and Canada to show that our laws have simply not matured in the way their counterparts have. The regulatory trend discernible in these jurisdictions is clearly a move away from an individual fault-based model like Australia’s toward one that casts a wider net, requiring duty-holders not to merely refrain from wrong-doing but to make at least reasonable efforts to promote equality.

Recent moves by Parliament to increase penalties for the use of 'obscene' language raise questions about the extent to which individuals have freedom of expression rights in Australia. I argue here that such laws might be challenged on the basis of the implied freedom of political communication developed by the Australian Courts. I look to the experience in other countries such as the United States where courts have upheld an individual's freedom of expression over attempts to regulate what a person can say, and the extent to which freedom of expression is protected in international instruments.

The infringement notice system is used extensively in Australia to address the effect of minor law breaking. However, the current expanding and increasingly punitive infringement system may perpetuate and entrench disadvantage for marginalised members of the community. It also stretches the resources of community legal centres responding to the impact on these disadvantaged people. This article presents an historical overview of infringement systems in Australia, explores the arguably unjust impact on disadvantaged groups and raises questions regarding the appropriateness of the current blurring of civil and criminal responses to minor offences.

As a break from CLC work in suburban Melbourne, the author volunteered her time and expertise to a not for profit organisation committed to providing south east Asian law students with skills training, helping instill in them professional values of public responsibility and social justice.

This list is a selection of local journal articles and books about community legal centres, prepared when researching the article 'Are CLCs Finished?' in this issue. Fittingly, most are from the Alternative Law Journal which began life as the Legal Service Bulletin, the Fitzroy Legal Service newsletter.

A handy guide to the main principles underlying the methods and motives for the correct use of footnotes and citations in law.

The Community Legal Education program at Victoria Legal Aid undertook a community engagement project with newly arrived communities in the Shepparton region. Sessions addressed gaps in the delivery of legal services, and identified opportunities to collaborate with local agencies already working with refugee communities.

This article examines the recent court trials of the twelve men who were implicated in the brutal killing of three Ahmadis, and of injuring several others, in a demonstration against Ahmadiyah in Cikeusik in 2011. It calls into question the integrity of the criminal justice system, and argues that the government must take a firm stance against the perpetrators of vigilante violence by ensuring fair and impartial trials in criminal cases concerning religious intolerance, rather than criminalising the activities of religious minorities.