Cross-Sectoral Consultation: Access to Justice #justicetalks #A2J

What is the biggest problem facing the legal profession? The Chief Justice of Canada says it is access to justice. Research suggests that almost half of Canadian adults will experience a significant legal problem over a three year period, but very few will find legal services to deal with that problem. So why doesn’t access to justice (“A2J”) have a higher public profile? The 2016-17 public lecture series, Cross-Sectoral Consultation: Access to Justice, hosted by Green College, and convened by Mary Liston and Andrew Pilliar of the Allard School of Law, explored how and why this problem touches the lives of a majority of Canadians not just now, but throughout their lives.

Each of these talks was a provocative and incisive survey of an important aspect of access to justice. The talks were recorded and they are available to the public as podcasts. Click the talk titles in the green buttons below to link directly to the podcasts.

Meet the A2J Series Convenors

Mary Liston, B.A. (Western), M.A. (York), Ph.D. (Toronto), Postdoctoral Fellowship in Law and Ethics (Toronto) LL.B. (Toronto), Peter A. Allard School of Law, University of British Columbia. Professor Liston's research focuses on advanced and comparative public law, Canadian administrative law, Aboriginal administrative law, theories of the rule of law, and law and literature. Her work has been cited by the Supreme Court of Canada. She is a co-author along with Craig S. Forcese, Adam Dodek, Philip Bryden, Peter Carver, Richard Haigh, and Constance MacIntosh of Public Law: Cases, Commentary and Analysis, 3rd Edition (Emond Publishing, 2015). Her publications are available at: http://ssrn.com/author=91545.

Andrew Pilliar is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Law at Thompson Rivers University. He holds law degrees from UBC and the University of Toronto, and a degree in biology and physics from Queen's University. His research focusses on access to justice, and specifically examines the structure of the market for personal legal services in order to propose ways to sustainably improve access to justice.