'Scottish law centres emerged from the Glasgow and Clydeside community activism that can be traced to the First World War and rent strikes across the city.' - mikedailly
I met Paul Brown, principal solicitor at Legal Services Agency at Sarti – a favourite for many Glaswegians and opposite the old tribunal centre.I wanted to capture and share some of his insights over those decades, as well as thank him for his remarkable and pioneering work that has helped so many people acrossWe started where it began for Scottish law centres: Castlemilk, 1979. The only law centre in Scotland back then.
“No-one else had identified that you could defend rent arrears and anti-social behaviour cases on the grounds of reasonableness. It hadn’t occurred to anyone in Scotland and the reason Jonathan knew about it was he’d studied English private sector law where people did indeed use reasonableness as a defence.”
Scottish law centres emerged from the Glasgow and Clydeside community activism that can be traced to the First World War and rent strikes across the city. It was non-lawyer, community activists who demanded their working-class communities get their own lawyers. And it was Glasgow CityIn the 1980s Paul wrote Dampness and the Law with Angus McIntosh from Castlemilk Law Centre.
Paul explained how the new law centre was an instant success: “What launched LSA to the public was we won a condensation dampness claim for child asthma against the council and [there was] a two-page spread about it in November 1989. That and working closely with the Glasgow tenants’ rights movement meant we immediately had more work than we could manage.”