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Edmonton, Alberta Fall 1999 University of Alberta The Radical Promise of Public Legal Education in Canada Lois Elaine Gander 0 A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment o € the requirements for the degree of Master of Laws Faculty of Law Edmonton, Alberta Fall 1999 National Library Bibliotheque nationale BlJll .,,a du Canada Acquisitions and Acquisitions et Bibliographic Services services bibliographiques 395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington OttawaON K1AON4 Ottawa ON K1A ON4 Canada Canada Your file Varre rs&rence Our M Nolre retdrence The author has granted a non- auteur a accorde une licence non exclusive licence allowing the exclusive pernettant a la National Library of Canada to Bibliotheque nationale du Canada de reproduce, loan, distribute or sell reproduire, prEter, dishibuer ou copies of this thesis in microform, vendre des copies de cette these sous paper or electronic formats. la fome de microfiche/film, de reproduction sur papier ou sur format electronique. The author retains ownership of the L'auteur conserve la propriete du copyright in this thesis. Neither the droit d'auteur qui protege cette these. thesis nor substantial extracts fiom it Ni la these ni des extraits substantiels may be printed or otherwise de celle-ci ne doivent Ctre imprimes reproduced without the author's ou autrement reproduits sans son permission. autonsation. Abstract Public legal education (PLE) emerged in Canada as an aspect of the legal services movement in the 1960s. This thesis traces the roots of PLE to the American War on Poverty and examines the early years of PLE through the prism of the new social reform paradigm that dominated that experience. The examination shows that while PLE shared the social justice goals of the period, when the new approach to reform was applied to innovative legal services it was adapted in ways that compromised the ability of PLE to achieve radical ends. The thesis concludes that recovering the radical promise of PLE requires overcoming the constraints inherent in the positivist concept of law that prompted those adaptations. Doing so would enable public legal education to play a more significant role in promoting access to justice rather than just access to law. Preface My involvement in public legal education (PLE) began in 1969, when, as a member of the first year law class at the University of Alberta, I participated in organizing Student Legal Services (SLS), a student-based legal aid service for the inner-city community of Boyle Street in Edmonton. Although I did my part in providing direct legal services to our clients, my passion became educating people about the law - whether by hanging out with ex-convicts at the Native Brotherhood office, providing back-up support to the staff of a drop-in centre for youth. or speaking to high school Iaw classes. These were the sixties and PLE had the thrill of being subversive. Legal knowledge was the guarded privilege of a select few. Sharing it with the masses was highly suspect. In fact my own access to that knowledge was by no means assured. I was at the front end of the surge of women demanding admission to the legal profession and the reception we received was less than whole-hearted welcome. Not that we made our presence easy to ignore. In one way or another, and not always on purpose, we seemed to challenge the statcis quo. Although PLE was not a feminist project, women played key roles in initiating many of the first PLE programs in Canada. Yet we are largely absent from the formal record. Men occupied the key positions in the legal institutions that mattered at the time and when it was trendy to be associated with PLE, they tended to step up to the podiums to speak for this emerging field of endeavour. Unfortunately, the women who came to define the practice of PLE have not written much about their work and I regret that their voices are not more present in my thesis. Much work remains to be done to capture that knowledge and make it available. The absence of a record of their thoughts is also a reflection of the subversiveness that shrouded PLE. To some extent, the iess that was known about what was going on, the better. It should not be surprising that the first people to take this work seriously were people whose presence in legal institutions was in itself destabilizing. In my third year of law school, I became the chair of the SLS steering committee and was responsible for handling the transition of SLS from a faculty-supported project to an independent organization. After a year of articles and another year of practice, I returned to SLS as its community advisor. My role was to support the involvement of students in community organizing and educational activities. As 1 indicate in this thesis, by the time I took up this position, the interest of students in radical action had already peaked and it was becoming increasingly difficult to carry out any long term community education or social reform activities. Since SLS was a student-based organization, it responded to students' changing interests and was constrained by their other commitments. My account of the history of PLE is heavily influenced by these experiences. Like others, I was radicalized by my experience in being part of the legal services movement and marked indelibly by images of the harshness of the existence of Canada's forgotten poor. The sixties may have been doomed, but like many others. it was a defining time in my life. With the Formation of the Alberta Law Foundation in 1972, it became possible for me to take public legal education more seriously. At a meeting to discuss their interest, the Foundation invited me to submit a proposal for a more concerted approach to addressing the PLE needs of Albertans. With the aid of a small group of interested teachers, lawyers, and community representatives, I submitted a proposal to create a legal resource centre which would develop and provide a range of public legal education services. In 1975, the Foundation began supporting this project and I left SLS to become the director of the new service, a post I occupied as a member of the Faculty of Extension at the University of Alberta which had agreed to take on responsibility for operating the project during its initial phase. In time, arrangements were made for the Faculty to assume continuing responsibility for the Legal Resource Centre. Over the next ten years or so, the Foundation generously supported our work and we were able to play a leadership role in developing and delivering innovative legal education services to teachers, librarians, community leaders, youth, and other individuals with an interest in law. By the mid 19SOs, the Foundation's own income had decreased significantly and it began what would become a series of reductions in its core funding of the Legal Resource Centre and of other public legal education services in the province. In response to its changing fortunes, the Legal Resource Centre became transformed into the Legal Studies Program of the Faculty of Extension and our activities became increasingly focused on using internet technology to extend our reach into the community. The Legal Studies Program is currently responsible for ACJNet. a national intemet-based legal education service and LawNow, a magazine and web- based service that not only provides current information about the law, but uses the lens of the law as a way of analyzing current social issues. The Legal Studies Program also undertakes special projects and cames out research on the theory and practice of public legal education. Throughout the thirty years or so of my involvement in public legal education, I have been both excited by the possibilities of the field, and frustrated by its apparent lack of real impact. In the infrequent times in which I have been able to reflect seriously on that apparent contradiction, I have concluded that what is lacking in PLE is any real body of knowledge about what we do and why we do it. Most of what is written has been compiled by "outsiders;" little by those of us who have developed the field through our thoughts and action. We need to articulate our understandings and subject them to rigourous analysis if we are to move fonvard. In particular, I think we must better ground PLE theoretically. If we can do so, we will not only e~chour own understanding of our work but also contribute to the body of knowledge of a variety of disciplines. This is not an easy task. Few of us in PLE have time for such reflection and. being action-oriented, we may feel little inclination to submit to the discipline of writing. Those of us who have that privilege and responsibility must still face the daunting prospect of reliving parts of our lives that we might wish to let rest. That was the case for me. When I began this project in t 99 1, I was exhausted from dealing with a series of particularly demanding personal and professional challenges and was casting about for new sources of inspiration to guide the next phase of my PLE work. I had happened upon a few articles written by critical legal theorists and was intrigued by the kind of analysis they were doing. It seemed that they were pursuing at an academic level what I associated with the radical aspects of public legal education. I wanted the opportunity to pursue that theoretical work and to become familiar with the emerging body of feminist analysis of the law.
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