The problem
Legislation is not practically accessible
It is a maxim that ignorance of the law is no excuse, but it is profoundly unsatisfactory if the law itself is not practically accessible. To a worryingly large extent, statutory law is not practically accessible today, even to the courts whose constitutional duty it is to interpret and enforce it. ... [This is a] problem of substantial constitutional importance. - Lord Justice Toulson in R v Chambers [2008] EWCA Crim 2467
The lack of access to statutes with appropriate links to the regulations and guidance which are currently in force must be a cause of serious inconvenience to anyone who does not have access to specialist services. We are concerned when information so fundamental to a democracy is difficult to identify, obtain and understand, and is frequently out of date. - The Law Commission in its 2006 report on Post-Legislative Scrutiny (Law Com 302 )
Case law is not open
We have BAILII to thank for providing free access to most recent judgments and some older judgments in a consistent, searchable format. But free access is not open access, and a large body of older case law is privately controlled and hence inaccessible except via expensive commercial services.
Case law is the basis for understanding legislation and making sense of law. In most European countries, case law is perceived as public sector information and is made available to users as such. In the UK, this has never been the case ... the copyright status of most judgments is unclear. ... First, unlike Europe, there is an argument over whether the judge is the owner of the copyright since he is not an employee of the crown. ... Second, the low level of originality which is found in the UK and Ireland as a requirement for copyright protection means that almost all older cases are copyright of either the transcriber or the reporter. - Philip Leith, Professor of Law, Queen’s University of Belfast, submission to the Gowers Review
The law is complex and unaffordable
Not only is the law not practically accessible, it is also complex and access to the law and justice is increasingly unaffordable.
Whilst it is reasonable to expect lawyers and other legal advisers to invest in the necessary text books and reference works or online services to inform themselves, commercial publications and services are becoming increasingly unaffordable except for the larger practices.
For the non-lawyer, the law is all but impenetrable and solving legal problems and resolving disputes is affordable, in practice, only to the very rich or those who are eligible for some kind of state support.
we need to empower citizens to sort out some of their own legal issues ... to enable citizens to be sufficiently familiar with the law and the legal system to recognize when they need some kind of help ... and in selecting the most appropriate resources of legal help for their purposes. - Richard Susskind in The End of Lawyers?