THE Baillieu government is undoing a decade of Labor's law reforms, with specialist courts for some of Victoria's most disadvantaged people the latest initiative in doubt.

In an interview with The Sunday Age, Attorney-General Robert Clark refused to guarantee that specialist courts such as the Neighbourhood Justice Centre in Collingwood, the Drugs Court in Dandenong, or Koori courts around the state would be retained. He said he wanted to ''mainstream'' what the courts had achieved, normally code for ending special treatment for specific groups.

Mr Clark has been scathing about the former attorney-general Rob Hulls, accusing him in this month's Law Institute Journal of treating the specialist courts as ''Soviet-era model farms, to distract attention from failures, rather than as mainstream institutions to be made available to all''.

Mr Hulls called the courts an example of ''therapeutic justice''.

At the Neighbourhood Justice Centre, for instance, a magistrate works alongside in-house psychologists and welfare workers to tackle the causes of crime. The Koori courts also provide a contrast to the mainstream system, with a magistrate conducting the hearing in an informal setting, often in the presence of Koori elders. An independent evaluation of the Neighbourhood Justice Centre last year showed the experiment had cut reoffending rates, and contributed to a fall in crime in the City of Yarra.