The Justice Gap

About The Justice Gap

The Justice Gap is a UK-based online magazine "about the law and justice and the difference between the two". Founded in late 2011 by the journalist and criminology lecturer Jon Robins, it reports on legal aid, access to justice, miscarriages of justice and the workings — and failings — of the criminal justice system in England and Wales. Aimed at the public rather than lawyers and run by journalists, it has become a distinctive and campaigning voice in British legal journalism, complemented by a print magazine called Proof and a student reporting scheme run with four universities. Its website is at thejusticegap.com.

Founding in 2011

The Justice Gap was launched in late 2011 by Jon Robins, a freelance journalist who had spent more than two decades writing about justice issues for the Guardian, Times, Independent on Sunday, Mail on Sunday and Observer. Robins, who remains the site's editor, conceived it as an online magazine about law and justice run by journalists and aimed squarely at the public — not at lawyers. He was joined at the outset by commissioning editors Brian Thornton, a senior journalism lecturer at the University of Winchester and former BBC producer, and Miranda Grell, a barrister and development officer at Hackney Community Law Centre.

The timing was pointed. The site launched just as the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders (LASPO) Bill was making its way through Parliament — legislation that would remove £350 million of publicly funded social-welfare advice from the legal aid scheme. Robins has described it as a particular low point for the justice system, and therefore exactly the right moment to launch a publication dedicated to the gap between law and justice.

Jon Robins: founder and editor

Jon Robins is an award-winning freelance journalist, author and lecturer in criminology at Brighton University. He is the author of several books on justice themes, including The Justice Gap: Whatever Happened to Legal Aid? (Legal Action Group, 2008, with Steve Hynes), The First Miscarriage of Justice (Waterside Press, 2014), Guilty Until Proven Innocent: The Crisis in Our Justice System (Biteback Publishing, 2018) and Justice in a Time of Austerity (Bristol University Press, 2021, with Dan Newman). He is joint secretary of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Miscarriages of Justice and vice chair of the Legal Action Group.

His journalism has been widely honoured: he is a two-time winner of the Bar Council's journalism award and a winner of the Halsbury Legal journalism award. As editor of The Justice Gap he has shaped it in his own image — rigorous, campaigning, sceptical of official claims and insistent that justice stories be told in language the public can understand.

The LASPO moment

The Justice Gap's founding cannot be understood without the legal aid crisis that prompted it. The LASPO Act 2012, introduced by the then justice secretary Ken Clarke, stripped vast areas of civil law — including most social-welfare, family, employment and immigration advice — out of the scope of legal aid. Clarke had claimed, seemingly without irony, that "access to justice" was the hallmark of a civilised society; The Justice Gap's first article answered with the headline "Access to justice: what the f*** does that mean?"

The blunt riposte set the template. The site has spent the years since documenting the consequences of the cuts: advice deserts where no legal aid lawyers remain, unrepresented defendants navigating complex courts alone, and a two-tier system in which justice depends on the ability to pay. Its reporting has kept the human cost of LASPO in public view long after the political debate moved on.

The "justice gap" concept

The site's title contains, as Robins puts it, an implicit criticism: a recognition that the system isn't working and that many people struggle to secure justice — not only the vulnerable or the poor. The campaigning lawyer Michael Mansfield KC once defined the justice gap for the site as "the increasing section of the public too poor to afford a lawyer and not poor enough to qualify for legal aid". Robins's own definition is wider still: the gap between the law as it is written and justice as it is experienced.

That framing gives the magazine its editorial range. It covers not only legal aid but policing, prisons, sentencing, miscarriages of justice, judicial diversity, court backlogs and the politics of law and order. The unifying question is always the same: does this law, this policy, this institution deliver justice — or merely process?

Editorial approach: journalism for the public

The Justice Gap's defining editorial choice is its audience: it is written for the public, not for lawyers. Where the legal press speaks in the jargon of the profession, The Justice Gap translates — explaining procedure, decoding judgments and telling the stories of the people caught up in the system. It is run by journalists rather than practitioners, which gives its coverage an outsider's clarity and a campaigner's edge.

An explicit aim of the magazine is to broaden the discussion about law and justice and to feature voices and perspectives not normally heard in the debate: defendants, prisoners' families, campaigners, whistleblowers and frontline advice workers, alongside the QCs and professors. The result is a publication that reads less like a law journal and more like a current-affairs magazine with justice as its beat.

Proof: the print magazine

Alongside the website, The Justice Gap produces a print magazine called Proof. The print edition allows for longer, more reflective journalism than the daily news cycle permits, with themed issues taking on subjects such as miscarriages of justice in depth. Contributors to Proof have included some of the most distinguished figures in British legal life, including Helena Kennedy KC, Martha Spurrier, Lord Tony Gifford and the investigative journalist David Conn.

A recent issue, The Other Ones, examined cases including the Birmingham Four, Andrew Malkinson's fight for justice and the scandal of joint enterprise convictions — a reminder that the magazine's print arm shares the website's preoccupation with the system's failures and the people fighting to correct them. Readers are encouraged to support The Justice Gap by buying Proof, making the magazine part of the site's funding model.

Notable contributors and interviews

The Justice Gap has attracted an impressive roster of contributors. Leading campaigning lawyers including Michael Mansfield KC have written for the site, alongside prominent journalists such as Ian Cobain, Bob Woffinden, David Jessel, David Rose and Eric Allison, as well as academics and other high-profile commentators. The breadth of the contributor base — from radical lawyers to mainstream reporters — reflects the magazine's ability to convene the justice debate's key voices.

Its interview archive is equally distinguished. The site has interviewed leading members of the legal profession, including the former Court of Appeal judge Henry Brooke, David Runciman of the Royal Commission on Criminal Justice and Michael Zander KC; politicians including the former lord chancellor Charlie Falconer and London mayor Sadiq Khan; campaigners such as Paddy Hill of the Birmingham Six, Peter Tatchell and Liberty's Shami Chakrabarti and Martha Spurrier; and cultural figures including the film-makers Jimmy McGovern and Ken Loach and the broadcaster Paul Gambaccini.

The student reporting scheme

In collaboration with four universities — Cardiff, Glasgow, Manchester and University College London — The Justice Gap runs a news reporting scheme open to students with an interest in journalism and a commitment to human rights. The scheme gives aspiring reporters the chance to cover justice stories for a real publication, mentored by working journalists, and it supplies the site with fresh reporting energy.

The scheme embodies the magazine's dual mission: to do journalism and to nurture the journalists of the future. For students, it offers bylines, training and an introduction to one of the most demanding beats in British journalism; for the site, it provides a pipeline of talent committed to its values. It is one of the more concrete ways in which The Justice Gap has tried to widen access — to journalism itself, as well as to justice.

Awards and recognition

The Justice Gap's journalism has earned recognition within the legal world and beyond. Its editor's two Bar Council journalism awards and Halsbury Legal journalism award testify to the regard in which the site is held by the profession it covers — a notable achievement for a publication that is frequently critical of that profession's institutions. The site's campaigns on legal aid deserts, miscarriages of justice and court failings have been cited in Parliament and picked up by the national press.

Perhaps more important than formal awards is the site's role as a hub for the access-to-justice movement: a place where campaigners, lawyers, academics and journalists meet, argue and organise. In a media environment where legal affairs coverage is shrinking, The Justice Gap has kept the flame burning for sustained, specialist, public-facing justice journalism.

The site today

More than a decade after its launch, The Justice Gap continues to publish at thejusticegap.com, still edited by Jon Robins and still holding to its founding mission. Its recent coverage — from ministers' denials of legal aid advice deserts to debates over neighbourhood justice and restorative justice panels — shows a publication that has lost none of its appetite for holding power to account.

The justice gap it was founded to expose has, if anything, widened since 2011: court backlogs have grown, legal aid deserts have spread and new scandals — from joint enterprise to wrongful convictions — continue to emerge. As long as that gap persists, The Justice Gap seems likely to persist with it: a small, stubborn, indispensable voice insisting on the difference between the law and justice.