The overarching aim of Balancing Rights is to increase discourse and engagement around the justice system as well as legal institutions to lead to long term reform and enable people to use legal institutions as a catalyst for change. There are multiple ways we aim to achieve this: 

 

Editorials: On our website, we publish well-researched, thought provoking articles that aim to inform. We cover broadly four large themes through them.  

1. Convictions: This focuses on the process by which offenders are convicted which includes the way in which investigations and evidence gathering mechanisms are currently structured, the functioning of different trial systems and finally how sentencing operates.

2. Carceral Systems: This examines the way in which prison systems work towards ensuring principles such as rehabilitation and can optimise outcomes for offenders through looking at different carceral models such as Open Prison Systems. 

3. Civil Rights: This looks into the role that legal systems can play in ensuring rights, whether that be upholding them in courts or codifying them through establishing precedents based on past rights. Our most recent thinkpiece on legal protections for gender affirming care covers this. 

4. The Ethics of Justice: Given the absence of objective moral codes, differing conceptions of what's right play an important role within the way a country's legal system works. In this section, we look to questions that probably do not have an answer but have vital implications for the law such as questions of moral luck in determining criminal culpability

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Legal Awareness: We believe that a critical way in which we increase engagement with legal systems is by democratising awareness and ensuring that kids from a young age are informed about their legal rights. This enables them to not only stand up for themselves, but stand up for broader reform within the system by creating a more informed future electorate. That is why we’ve worked to create a comprehensive legal education curriculum that we spread through workshops 

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Interviews: The final project we’re currently working on is platforming experiences that people have had with different parts of the legal system. This is incredibly important to us not only because we believe that everyone should have the ability to share their story but also because the awareness that firsthand accounts are able to generate is unparalleled. These stories have the ability to feature primary information about the actual challenges that people face during rehabilitation or during trials as well as move past what is merely on paper to meaningfully examine the on-ground reality within legal systems. 

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