Direito em Movimento - Volume 18 - Número 3 - Edição Especial

180 Direito em Movimento, Rio de Janeiro, v. 18 - n. 3, p. 176-198, 2020 - Ed. Especial ARTIGOS My interest in PLS began soon after I left Florence when I become in- volved, back in the UK,with launching a rural law centre to serve rural Devon. In the early 1980’s, community law centres were confined to urban deprived areas and rural deprivation was almost invisible. I was part of a team that, almost 40 years ago, in September 1981, put forward a proposal for A Rural Law Centre to serve a rural area and published a paper setting out a number of potential models for rural legal service delivery, the last of which was the ‘peripatetic’ model that utilised “a mobile unit (a converted bus or van) which travelled around the catchment area in order to reach isolated villages and communities” (ECONOMIDES, 1999, p. 65). This proposal eventually led to a major research project, the ESRC-funded Access to Justice in Rural Britain Project , several articles and a book co-authored with two geographers, Jus- tice Outside the City : Access to Legal Services in Rural Britain (BLACKSELL, ECONOMIDES & WATKINS, 1991; ECONOMIDES & BLACK- SELL, 1987). By 2001 the Devon Law Centre (a community law centre) was finally established but this closed a decade later due to lack of stable funding (I was a director of the law centre from 2001 to 2006) and during this period a Devon Law Bus was proposed but never became operative, again due to a lack of funds (ECONOMIDES, 2003; ECONOMIDES, 2011, p. 50-51). As my latest article documents, PLS have flourished all over the globe and modern itinerant public legal services – including legal advice as well as court and mediation services – had already began in Norway in 1971 with the Jussbuss. Since the 1980s, PLS were developed in Latin America, Africa, Australia, North America, Pakistan, Timor-Leste and the Philippines all of which, in different ways, put “justice on wheels”, but probably nowhere on the scale they have evolved in Brazil where buses, boats and aircraft are deployed to help deliver judicial (and other) services to remote com- munities (ECONOMIDES, TIMOSHANKO & FERRAZ, 2020, p. 51-58). 9 Itinerant legal services invariably reflect an imaginative response from a dedicated but disparate group - that may include participation by 9 For information on a Canadian itinerant court, see: CREE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT (n.d.). For a more beha- vioural explanation of the processes that determine how people enter the legal system, see BLANKENBURG (1984).