Welcome to 2018 from UKAJI!

We are beginning a new phase of the UKAJI project that will see us progressing the research priorities we’ve identified in our Research Roadmap, which will be published later this month. And we can’t think of a better way to start the year than to announce that UKAJI’s lead, Professor Maurice Sunkin, was appointed Honorary Queen’s Counsel in December 2017.

We are grateful to all those who responded to our consultation last year on research priorities and helped shape the Roadmap. This is a living document, an organic resource, intended to inform decisions about what research is needed and funded and to encourage more, and more targeted, empirical research on administrative justice. The aims of this work are to ensure that research evidence feeds into policies and procedures that fundamentally affect people in their everyday lives and to contribute to improvements in the quality of decision-making by public bodies and the quality of justice obtained by individuals.

We are also grateful to all the members of our Wider Core Team and our Advisory Board, who have helped shape UKAJI’s work over the past three years.

We’ll be working with researchers, funders, practitioners and policy-makers to maintain and further develop the links that are crucial to the shared aim of using empirical evidence to inform administrative justice initiatives. We have built a community and intend to keep it going. Our blog and the website are valuable research resources and can be used in a number of ways:

• On the What is administrative justice? page you’ll find links to the reports of research projects mapping administrative justice in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. You’ll also find a discussion paper exploring the boundaries of admin justice.
• On the Project websites page you’ll find descriptions of related research projects and links to the project websites.
• Our Current research register is updated twice a year with new current projects, alongside a number of in-depth profiles of projects. You can search by researcher name, keyword, funder, and more.
• The Summaries of research section contains summaries of research on aspects of administrative justice, including tribunals and courts, ombuds and mediation.
• The Blog includes summaries of recent research and updates on developments in administrative justice. You can find blog posts on specific topics or by specific authors in a number of ways:
  • Use the Search box at the top of every page to enter your own search term. Entering a term here and clicking will take you to all the posts in which that term appears. You can search, for example, for all the mentions of ‘legal aid’ or ‘Australia’ using this box.
  • Use the month-by-month Archive of Blog Posts: A pull-down menu on the home page lists posts by the date on which they were published. By clicking on a month, you will get to all the posts published that month.
  • The Recent Posts list: This lists the most recent blog posts by title, and you can click the one you want to get to the actual post.
  • Categories: The subjects covered by the blog posts are listed to the right. You can click on any of the categories to get to all the posts on that particular subject.

Submit a blog post

UKAJI welcomes contributions from academic researchers, practitioners, policy makers and others interested in this field. The style of the blog is to be accessible to range of audiences, so we encourage contributions that are clear and engaging. The usual length is 500-800 words, but we can be flexible on this and accommodate longer pieces. Suggestions for posts and drafts should be emailed to ukaji@essex.ac.uk.

Our primary focus is on research on administrative justice, but we welcome submissions on other topics because we recognise the need for research to be grounded in the real world and to demonstrate impact. We therefore publish pieces on new legislation, relevant litigation, and current affairs. UKAJI’s focus is on the UK, but we are interested in posts on other jurisdictions that have relevance for administrative justice in the UK.