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

181 ARTIGOS Direito em Movimento, Rio de Janeiro, v. 18 - n. 3, p. 176-198, 2020 - Ed. Especial judges, lawyers, para-legals, social workers, legal academics, law students and community activists – determined to take law to the people, in order that the rhetoric behind the rule of law might become more of a reality and access is no longer solely dependent on one’s postcode (COVER- DALE, 2011). I see itinerant legal services as correcting imperfections in the legal services market and meeting legal needs that tend to be ignored by most judges and lawyers in private practice (REMOTE LAW CAN- ADA, n. d.; HART, 2018). As noted by Prof Mauro Cappelletti following his visit to the 11th Ibero-American Day of Procedural Law, held in May 1988 in Rio de Janei- ro, 10 we can also find much earlier precedents for IJ dating back to medieval times, as seen for example in the English circuits where circuit judges, or ‘justices in eyre’ ( justiciae errantes ), 11 in effect combined law and govern- ment, but often in a manner that struck fear in the population. Itinerant judges initially aimed to centralise justice by harmonising local custom into one common law for the whole of England and in effect transferred power from local to central courts. Far from seeking access to these circuit courts, people often preferred to run away from them, as the legal historian Prof Sir John Baker 12 explains: The general eyres were not merely law courts; they were itinerant government. They begat fear and awe in the entire population…. and we learn of Cornishmen fleeing to the woods to escape the eyre of 1233. Popular reaction was to kill the general eyre in the mid- -fourteenth century. (BAKER, 1979, p. 15) So, while today we think of IJ as a well-meaning, at times almost evangelical, flexible initiative designed to extend the rule of law to commu- 10 Private correspondence between Professors Mauro Cappelletti and Hugo Jerke, 31 May 1988, in which Prof Cap- pelletti fully supports the introduction of itinerant justice in Brazil having learnt about developments from Prof Jerke: “The idea of facilitating access to justice through an itinerant justice system seems excellent to me, especially bearing in mind the geographical and social situation of a large and pluralistic country like Brazil. Moreover, it is an idea not without historical (for example, in England) and contemporary (for example, in Norway) precedents. I therefore warmly con- gratulate you and your colleagues for this interesting and useful initiative, and for the spirit in which you are making it.” 11 The word ‘eyre’ could be derived from the Latin word ‘iter’ meaning ‘journey’, though another possible expla- nation is that it comes from the old French ‘oyer’ meaning ‘to hear’. 12 See also COCKBURN (1972, p. 13-62).