Good Law Project uses the law to protect the interests of the public. We prioritise tackling poverty and inequality, protecting the environment and upholding democracy.
Our strategic litigation aims to bring about significant legal, social or political change, by creating precedent, changing or defending the law, or ensuring the law is properly enforced. Beyond our immediate and specific successes, we seek to deliver long-term impact for good.
Tackling poverty and inequality: since the start of the pandemic we have successfully challenged the systematically unfair standardisation of English exam results by Ofqual, which overwhelmingly affected young people from disadvantaged areas; we contributed through legal challenge to the successful campaign to ensure that the poorest children in England received free school meals over the summer holidays, moving the goalposts significantly in this area; and we brought a challenge to establish the right of every school age child in England who is being taught remotely to a device and router, resulting in hundreds of thousands of devices and routers being made available by government.
We are working to stop – and have stopped some – large corporations using employment schemes that amount to indentured labour, affecting new graduates from disadvantaged backgrounds. We are working in partnership with Windrush campaigners to deliver justice and compensation for a number of the affected UK citizens.
Protecting the environment: we use strategic litigation to uphold and strengthen environmental laws. We are bringing a legal challenge to the national policy statement on energy infrastructure, which influences every planning decision in the country with a bias towards fossil fuels. We also have cases in the pipeline to challenge both air and water pollution.
Upholding democracy and democratic governance and accountability: we use the law to strengthen and uphold parliamentary sovereignty, democratic rights and accountability in the UK. We successfully challenged the 2019 prorogation of Parliament in the Supreme Court, and are challenging the probity of recent procurement decisions by government in relation to protective personal equipment and communications consultancy during the pandemic.
We select our cases carefully. We only take cases that are consistent with our values, and we ask ourselves in particular:
- does this fall within one of our priority areas?
- does it address significant issues of disadvantage, unfairness or discrimination, preferably for a relatively large cohort of people?
- does it have a strategic impact, with systemic implications beyond the specifics of the case?
Taking a case by case approach, we also consider the prospects for a successful outcome, whether the litigation can be funded, and whether the litigation would be brought (or the underlying issues effectively addressed) without our involvement.