Access to Justice, Community Justice Help and Legal Empowerment

In this section, we consider:

(In)Access to justice and lawyer assistance in Canada and comparative jurisdictions

“Access to justice” is a broad term that has been defined in a variety of ways and can encompass a range of factors and issues. For the purpose of this report, we offer this definition:

“Access to justice” exists when people can pursue their goals and address their law-related problems in ways that are consistent with fair legal standards and processes; and can obtain, understand, and act on information and services related to the law, where necessary, to achieve just outcomes.70

The need for and lack of access to justice has been identified, explained and analyzed in numerous recent reports in Canada.71 These reports usually draw on a body of evidence that has developed from periodic surveys, many originating from the Research Branch of the Department of Justice, on the prevalence of so-called “everyday legal problems”, the pathways that people take to address those problems, and their assessments of the process and outcomes.72 These surveys generally follow a model pioneered in England and Wales and are now applied in numerous countries. The Canadian findings are generally consistent with findings in comparative international jurisdictions.73

Across jurisdictions, there is a generally similar level of prevalence of civil legal problems, although some differences in which types of problems are more prevalent. There are also similar indicators of clustering of problems, legal and non-legal, as well as of triggering effects. Heightened prevalence of particular types of problems, or numbers of problems, is generally evident among people experiencing social marginalization. At the same time, there are some potentially material differences in relation to some findings of particular relevance to this report, namely, findings on the extent of advice-seeking behavior and the sources of legal and non-legal assistance. These differences are seen in comparing findings from England and Wales, where the regulation of legal services is significantly less lawyer-centric, with findings in the US and Canada. In this part of the section, we will provide a brief overview of Canadian findings that shed a general light on access to justice in a lawyer-centric system.

For the purpose of framing access to justice in the context of this report, the following reproduces a summary of key findings of the most recent national survey conducted in Canada which are of most relevance to community justice help:74

This collection of findings provides only a partial picture of the access to justice landscape, but it provides a solid basis for the view that one aspect of the problem of lack of access to justice is lack of availability of accessible and affordable help from lawyers.

It is important to note that it does not necessarily follow that the best or only way to improve access to justice is to find ways to make lawyers more accessible and affordable. As a leading access to justice scholar has emphasized, it should not be presumed that the assistance of lawyers, nor participation in formal legal processes, is necessarily required or desired to secure all legal entitlements or to resolve all legal problems (or to resolve the entirety of a legal problem) consistently with legal norms.92 As the survey findings demonstrate, people use a variety of pathways for addressing everyday legal problems and a significant proportion of people express a preference for improved availability of forms of assistance other than having a lawyer to handle their problem. This is not to say that the assistance of lawyers is not valuable; indeed, in many circumstances, it can be crucial. The point is only that the assistance of lawyers may not always be necessary or desirable. In Section 7 we give some consideration to research on the issue of when the assistance of lawyers is most important.

This suggests a need to recognize that accessing justice should be distinguished from accessing the formal legal system, that is, accessing the assistance of lawyers or other licensed legal professionals and participating in formal legal processes. While people should be able to access both justice and the formal legal system, it is useful to distinguish them for two reasons: first, because people ought to be able to access justice even when they cannot access the formal legal system; and second, accessing the formal legal system may not be necessary, may not be sufficient or may not be the most effective way to access justice. The legal standards, processes and outcomes of the formal legal system, when fair and just, must always be a reference point for defining when justice has been accessed, but accessing justice cannot and should not always be equated with accessing the formal legal system.93

In keeping with that recognition, this report focuses on the role that non-lawyers in community-based not-for-profit settings are playing. To assist in explaining that focus, we next situate lawyer-centricity, and alternatives, in relation to the justice needs of marginalized communities.

Non-lawyers and the justice needs of marginalized communities

The nature and context of the life circumstances and needs of marginalized people and communities mean that non-lawyer forms of law-related assistance may be particularly important in terms of practicality and effectiveness. The practicality lies in the assistance being available at no cost from sources already embedded in and accessed by the community. The effectiveness lies in the assistance being available from helpers who are skilled in understanding and engaging the challenging social context of people living on low incomes or otherwise experiencing marginalization.

Many people have life-affecting problems that include a legal dimension, either in how the problem is defined or how the problem might be resolved, or both – the legal right of a tenant to a habitable apartment; the legal obligation of a separating parent to pay child support; the legal protection against discrimination in employment; the legal entitlement to employment insurance. Often, life-affecting problems will have other dimensions as well – social, financial, health-related, and so on. The legal dimension of a problem may be dominant or it may be minor or somewhere in between; indeed, the “legal” aspect of a life-affecting problem may be difficult to extricate or identify.

People whose problems are multidimensional may want – and need – a range of assistance, including help accessing social services or services relating to settlement, family support, health care or financial matters. And they may want and need help with a variety of types of tasks, such as help in making inquiries, discussing a problem with another “party”, writing a letter, or completing a form.

The need to explore the role of non-lawyers in community-based not-for-profit settings thus in part arises from recognition of the fact that people may need assistance across a range of legal and non-legal dimensions, as well as a range of types of assistance.

The need is then compounded by recognizing that the social context of marginalized people and communities creates particular challenges for providing and obtaining effective assistance. These challenges have been identified in research exploring the reach and effectiveness of legal services provided by lawyers to people who live in social circumstances of disadvantage or what is also referred to as people with “complex needs”.94 One key challenge is simply reaching people with complex needs – that itself requires particular approaches. The other key challenge is then providing appropriate help.

These dual challenges are reflected in a study emanating from Australia,95 but situated in comparative literature and experience, that explains that implementing access to justice in this context tends to require approaches to the delivery of legal services that exhibit four key themes or features:96

  1. targeted to those in need, including proactive outreach;
  2. joined-up with non-legal services;
  3. timely to minimize problem impact and maximize service utility; and
  4. appropriate to the needs and capabilities of the users.

More specifically on the challenge of appropriate provision, another study from Australia97 that undertook a review of studies on effectiveness of outreach legal services explains:

As well as actually reaching “hard-to-reach” clients, several findings of the review identified the importance of providing legal assistance in a way which is appropriate for clients with complex needs. Clients with complex needs may have multiple intersecting legal and non-legal issues. While they may only come to an advisor or lawyer about one issue, this issue may well be bound up with other issues in their lives. In addition, due to the nature of their disadvantage, these clients tend to have difficulties in working with lawyers and dealing with their legal issues. They may have cognitive impairment or literacy issues which affect their interactions with lawyers and others. They may feel intimidated and lack trust in the prospect of dealing with lawyers and may feel embarrassed about seeking assistance (particularly for debt related problems). They may not always attend appointments, may not have necessary documentation and may be difficult to locate for follow up assistance.98

A Canadian report produced in the context of a review of the provision of civil legal aid in Ontario has noted a collection of other factors that contribute to the challenges of reach and effectiveness: a lack of resources – both in the form of legal information and in the form of social power – for developing legal consciousness; a need to assert rights in contexts of dependency and vulnerability; physical barriers; and language barriers.99 An academic report on two modest empirical studies, conducted in British Columbia and Saskatchewan, of lawyering competencies for improving access to justice for marginalized clients, emphasizes the need for providers of legal assistance to invest time and energy in building trust with marginalized communities.100 Another report from British Columbia notes that, while access to lawyers is fundamentally desirable and important, non-lawyer community-based advocates were generally regarded as having certain advantages:

Clients are more likely to speak to advocates about their legal problems, which allows advocates to offer better quality assistance. Advocates have greater compassion and sensitivity for client circumstances, do not use technical language, and are more approachable and flexible.101

A more recent Canadian report has drawn attention to the challenges associated with living in rural and remote communities.102 A further factor, at a time when legal information and resources are increasingly available online, is lack of internet access and lack of digital literacy.103 Another Canadian study has also drawn attention to the fact that many people may not have a level of functional or technical literacy to understand and complete forms relating to legal claims and processes.104 In these contexts, enabling law-related assistance from non-lawyers may be the most practical and effective way forward.

Lawyer-centricity as a damper on access to justice

The potentially important role of non-lawyer assistance appears to be reinforced by comparison of findings on advice-seeking behavior in England and Wales, where non-lawyers are more broadly permitted to provide law-related assistance, compared to the US and Canada. Two studies indicate that justice may be relatively more accessible in England and Wales than in Canada and other more “lawyer-centric” jurisdictions.

One study compares everyday-legal-problems survey findings in the US and England and Wales and argues that access to justice is more unequal in the lawyer-centric US context and, correspondingly, that people there are more likely, across all social demographics, to “do nothing” about their problems.105

Another study that is referred to in a Canadian volume of essays on middle income access to justice,106 draws attention to the findings in a 2009 survey that almost 60 percent of people in England and Wales sought formal legal advice for a difficult-to-solve justiciable issue, but that only 13 percent of that advice came from lawyers. A significant proportion of the remaining legal advice came from so-called “alternative” sources, including “Citizen’s Advice Bureaux, local authorities, trade unions, social workers, the police, politicians, and clerics”.107 In comparison, in Canada, the findings of a comparable 2007 survey were that only about 12 percent of people sought formal legal advice, the bulk of which had to have come from lawyers, given the then prevailing regulatory frameworks, while about 22 percent sought advice from non-legal sources such as trade unions, politicians’ offices and social workers. This indicates that the overall level of advice-seeking behavior was lower in Canada, even though about the same proportion of people sought advice from lawyers.

Although these comparative assessments are modest in number and depth, they clearly and consistently suggest that where legal advice can be obtained from non-lawyers, relatively more people will seek that advice. In turn, this suggests that expanding community justice help may be both practical and effective as a means of improving access to justice.

Community justice help, legal capability, and legal empowerment

In the final part of this section, we briefly consider the ideas of legal capability and legal empowerment as alternative or supplementary reference points for framing the justifiability and feasibility of expanding community justice help in order to improve access to justice for those most in need of it. We do so because, in reviewing available literature and programs on the role of non-lawyers in improving the reach of law-related assistance, we found these concepts to be useful in understanding how best to advance access to justice for people and communities experiencing poverty and other forms of social disadvantage.

In keeping with the argument that improving access to justice requires moving beyond lawyer-centric regulation, we want to suggest that it may also be useful to reframe or, at least, to supplement “access to justice” as the guiding ideal and objective. More specifically, available recent literature on the role of non-lawyers in improving the reach of law-related assistance emphasizes the concepts of “legal capability” and “legal empowerment”.

The concept of legal capability has been integrated into research on how people respond to legal problems that they frequently experience, including in the most recent Canadian survey, as well as into research on public legal education. In a report surveying development of the concept, Community Legal Education Ontario (CLEO) defined legal capability as “the knowledge, skills and personal characteristics and circumstances needed to deal with legal problems on one’s own”.108 The CLEO report notes that the concept of legal capability has been traced to foundational work on “capabilities”, by economist Amartya Sen, in the context of development, freedom and human rights.109

This and another CLEO report110 also observe that the concept of legal capability has overtaken the concept of legal literacy as an organizing idea in relation to access to justice. They also explain how the concept of legal capability can be understood as performing a similar role to the concept of social determinants of health in drawing attention to the significant role that poverty and other forms of social disadvantage play in determining the extent to which people can enjoy health or justice. In this sense, legal capability is regarded as a particularly valuable concept to the extent that it is necessarily attuned to social context and circumstances; whereas legal literacy has been seen as a somewhat acontextual concept.

The most recent Canadian legal problems survey sought information from respondents on their self-perceptions of legal capability by asking them to assess themselves in terms of five aspects of legal capability: recognition and understanding of the seriousness or potential seriousness of the problem; awareness of any legal implications related to the problem; knowledge of where to go to obtain reliable information about resolving the problem; knowledge of what sort of assistance is needed to resolve the problem; and overall knowledge to deal confidently with the problem.111 Consistent with other studies,112 the Canadian survey found that there was significant variation in levels of legal capability across these five aspects and, generally speaking, that higher legal capability was associated with better outcomes and greater likelihood to obtain legal advice.113

The significance of the increasing focus on legal capability for contemporary efforts to advance access to justice has been encapsulated by two of the lead researchers associated with the most recent Canadian study.114 In their view, access to justice literature and activity is now emphasizing a new alternative conception of “meaningful” access to justice that “measures access for a person not necessarily in terms of access to lawyers and adjudicated decisions but rather by how helpful the path is for addressing and resolving that person’s legal problem or complaint”.115 In turn, as they analyze it, meaningful access to justice has four pillars: it is problem-focused, people-centred, mobilization-oriented, and acknowledges the role of systemic injustices.116 It is especially in the understanding and interaction of the second and third pillars that the significance of attending to legal capability is revealed. This is encapsulated in the following passage, although the authors use the term “legal consciousness” instead of legal capability:

The second pillar [of meaningful access to justice] is that it is person-centred, as opposed to service-provider or system-centred. The point is that legal services that promote meaningful access to justice are designed to serve the person in need, not the service provider or the legal profession. The third pillar is that how these actors understand and make sense of legal rights – their legal consciousness – is of fundamental importance to their legal mobilization. The important idea underlying this pillar is that legal consciousness affects when and whether people recognize their problems as legal and the decisions they make about how to address those problems.117

For present purposes, what is important here is the emphasis on the pivotal role that legal capability (or legal consciousness) plays in enabling people to “mobilize” themselves (to take action) to address their legal issues and problems and, in so doing, to pursue access to justice. This reframing is significant for efforts to advance access to justice because it focuses attention more fully on exploring how to support people to take action to pursue access to justice, rather than focusing on what the formal legal system is willing to offer as access to justice. In a nutshell, the reframing can prompt our understanding of access to justice to be more people-centered, rather than lawyer- or system-centered. This reframing can be enhanced by then making connections between the idea of supporting people’s legal capability to take action (or mobilize) and the concept of legal empowerment.

The proximity of the concept of legal empowerment to legal capability has been noted in a UK report that informs the CLEO reports discussed above:

Legal capability can be defined as the abilities that a person needs to deal effectively with law-related issues. These capabilities fall into three areas: knowledge, skills, and attitudes, emphasising that capability needs to go beyond knowledge of the law, to encompass skills like the ability to communicate plus attitudes like confidence and determination.
The concept of legal capability is explicitly about empowerment, looking at the abilities people need in order to deal effectively with law-related issues.118

The concept of legal empowerment itself originates from research and advocacy on law and development, where it was initially put forward by Stephen Golub as a counter to what he regarded as the misplaced emphasis on system-oriented reforms for improving justice in global development contexts. Golub defines legal empowerment as “the use of rights and laws specifically to increase disadvantaged populations’ control over their lives”.119 Generally speaking, legal empowerment initiatives seek to focus directly on the needs of disadvantaged populations and to develop programs that proactively serve those needs. As such, legal empowerment approaches are contrasted with traditional “rule of law” approaches in law and development, which focus more on the operation of legal institutions, such as courts, and only meet the needs of disadvantaged populations indirectly, if at all.120 A key example of a legal empowerment initiative is so-called “barefoot” or “community” paralegals, who are typically non-lawyers who are embedded in justice-seeking communities and are trained to support those communities in recognizing and addressing legal problems.121 Other strategies include legal literacy and capability programs and community legal education.122

While the concept and approaches of legal empowerment originate in the global development context, over the past decade they have been recognized as relevant to and useful for improving access to justice for disadvantaged communities in high-income countries such as Canada and the comparative jurisdictions considered in this report. For example, after reviewing a variety of programs of legal empowerment internationally, including programs using community paralegals, Jacinta Maloney concluded that they ought to be considered for disadvantaged communities in Australia.123 Similarly, a collection of papers associated with a summit on access to justice at Fordham University School of Law included a brief paper that framed non-lawyer initiatives in the United States and Canada in terms of the concept and approaches of legal empowerment.124

We have briefly reviewed the attention given to the concepts of legal capability and legal empowerment in literature on access to justice because they provide reference points for supplementing our understanding of how to improve access to justice for people and communities experiencing social disadvantage. The emphasis that these supplementary concepts place on people-centred approaches, using community-based sources of assistance, reinforces our focus in this report on the potential to expand community justice help. Just as it can be argued that there is a need to move beyond lawyer-centrism in the regulation and delivery of law-related assistance in general, and legal services more particularly, so too must we be aware that the ideal of access to justice, and ideas on how to improve it, may also be prone to lawyer-centrism. When the concepts and approaches of legal capability and legal empowerment are applied, the understanding of access to justice becomes more people-centered and empowerment-oriented, rather than lawyer- or system-centered. This leads us to exploring better support for the role of community justice help in advancing access to justice, especially in contexts of social disadvantage.

Footnotes

70 This definition was developed for our report: Julie Mathews & David Wiseman, “Community Justice Help: Advancing Community-Based Access to Justice” (Community Legal Education Ontario, June 2019) at 11, online (pdf): CLEO Connect www.cleoconnect.ca/resource/research/community-justice-help-advancing-community-based-access-to-justice/ [Mathews & Wiseman]. Our definition draws on a variety of sources, including, in particular, T. C. W. Farrow, “What is Access to Justice?” (2014) 51:3 Osgoode Hall Law Journal 957 at 983; Karen Cohl, Access to Justice Themes: “Quotable Quotes”, (background paper for the Law Society of Ontario’s Access to Justice Symposium: Creating a Climate for Change, Toronto, Treasurer’s Advisory Group on Access to Justice, 2013), online (pdf): Law Society of Ontario www.lawsocietyontario.azureedge.net/media/lso/media/legacy/pdf/q/quotable_quotes.pdf; and Rebecca L. Sandefur, “Access to What?” (2019) 148:1 Daedalus 49 at 50 [Sandefur, “Access to What”].

71 Canadian Bar Association, Reaching equal justice report; An invitation to envision and act(Ottawa: Canadian Bar Association, November 2013), online (pdf): Canadian Bar Association www.cba.org/Publications-Resources/Resources/Equal-Justice-Initiative/Reaching-Equal-Justice-An-Invitation-to-Envisi-(1) [CBA, Reaching equal justice]; Canadian Bar Association, Canada’s Crisis in Access to Justice, Submission to the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (Ottawa: Canadian Bar Association, April 2006). See also: Action Committee on Access to Justice in Civil and Family Matters, Access to Civil & Family Justice: A Roadmap for Change (Ottawa: Action Committee on Access to Justice in Civil and Family Matters, October 2013), online (pdf): Canadian Forum on Civil Justice www.cfcj-fcjc.org/sites/default/files/docs/2013/AC_Report_English_Final.pdf [Action Committee on Access to Justice].

72 Currie, Nudging the Paradigm Shift, supra note 1; Michael J Trebilcock, Anthony Duggan & Lorne Sossin, Middle Income Access to Justice, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012).

73 For consideration of general consistency of findings, see Jamie Baxter, Michael J Trebilcock, & Albert H Yoon, “The Ontario Civil Legal Needs Project: A Comparative Analysis of 2009 Survey Data” in Michael J Trebilcock, Anthony Duggan & Lorne Sossin, eds, Middle Income Access to Justice, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012) [Baxter, Trebilcock & Yoon]. See also, Pascoe Pleasence, Christine Coumarelos, Suzie Forell & Hugh M McDonald, “Reshaping Legal Assistance Services: Building on the Evidence Base: A Discussion Paper (Sydney: Law and Justice Foundation of New South Wales, April 2014), online (pdf): Law and Justice Foundation of New South Wales www.lawfoundation.net.au/ljf/site/articleIDs/D76E53BB842CB7B1CA257D7B000D5173/$file/Reshaping_legal_assistance_services_web.pdf [Pleasence, Coumarelos, Forell & McDonald].

74 The summary originally appears in Mathews & Wiseman, supra note 70 at 12-13. The survey data is available in Canadian Forum on Civil Justice, Everyday Legal Problems and the Cost of Justice in Canada, Cost of Justice Survey Data (Toronto: Canadian Forum on Civil Justice, 2018), online (pdf): Canadian Forum on Civil Justice www.cfcj-fcjc.org/wp-content/uploads/Everyday-Legal-Problems-and-the-Cost-of-Justice-in-Canada-Cost-of-Justice-Survey-Data.pdf. The statistics reported in what follows are drawn from the analysis of survey data in Currie, Nudging the Paradigm Shift, supra note 1.

75 Our discussion paper primarily considers civil, rather than criminal, legal problems.

76 The term “everyday legal problem” is used by the survey.

77 Currie, Nudging the Paradigm Shift, supra note 1 at 4.

78 Ibid. at 7-15.

79 Ibid. at 8.

80 Ibid. at 7-15 and 24-28. See also Pleasence, Coumarelos, Forell & McDonald, supra note 73 at 5-17.

81 Action Committee on Access to Justice, supra note 71 at 14.

82 Currie, Nudging the Paradigm Shift, supra note 1 at 15.

83 Ibid. at 17.

84 Ibid. at 15. See also Trevor C W Farrow, Ab Currie, Nicole Aylwin, Les Jacobs, David Northrup and Lisa Moore, Everyday Legal Problems and the Cost of Justice in Canada: Overview Report (Toronto: Canadian Forum on Civil Justice, 2016), online (pdf): Canadian Forum on Civil Justice www.cfcj-fcjc.org/sites/default/files/Everyday%20Legal%20Problems%20and%20the%20Cost%20of%20Justice%20in%20Canada%20-%20Overview%20Report.pdf at 107.

85 Currie, Nudging the Paradigm Shift, supra note 1 at 23.

86 Ibid. at 22-23.

87 Ibid. at 20.

88 Ibid. at 21.

89 Ibid. at 18.

90 Ibid. at 19.

91 Ibid. at 18.

92 Sandefur, supra note 40.

93 We refer here to “fair and just” legal standards, processes and outcomes in order to preserve space for contesting the fairness and justness of prevailing legal norms. We acknowledge that many communities experiencing social disadvantage are treated unfairly and unjustly in the current legal system. We also acknowledge that First Nations, Métis and Inuit communities have justifiable claims to using their own Indigenous legal norms as the relevant reference point.

94 Forell & Gray, “Outreach legal services to people with complex needs”, supra note 56.

95 Pleasence, Coumarelos, Forell & McDonald, supra note 73.

96 Ibid. at iii.

97 Forell & Gray, “Outreach legal services to people with complex needs”, supra note 56.

98 Ibid. at 10.

99 Janet E Mosher & Ian Morrison, “Barriers to Access to Civil Justice for Disadvantaged Groups” in Ontario Law Reform Commission, Rethinking Civil Justice: Research Studies for the Civil Justice Review, vol 1 (Toronto: Ontario Law Reform Commission, 1996) 637.

100 Sarah Marsden & Sarah Buhler, “Lawyer Competencies for Access to Justice: Two Empirical Studies” (2017) 34:2 Windsor YB Access to Justice 186.

101 Andrea Long & Anne Beveridge, Delivering Poverty Law Services: Lessons from BC and Abroad (Vancouver: Social Planning and Research Council BC, August 2004) at 18.

102 Karen Cohl & George Thomson, Connecting Across Language and Distance: Linguistic and Rural Access to Legal Information and Services (Toronto: The Law Foundation of Ontario, December 2008).

103 Roger Smith, “Digital Delivery of Legal Services to People on Low Incomes” (Winter 2016), online (pdf): The Legal Education Foundation www.thelegaleducationfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Digital-Technology-Winter-2016.pdf?x57167. See also Tea Hadziristic, The State of Digital Literacy in Canada: A Literature Review (Toronto: Brookfield Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, 2017).

104 Amy Salyzyn, Lori Isaj, Brandon Piva & Jacquelyn Burkell, “Literacy Requirements of Court Documents: An Under-Explored Barrier to Access to Justice” (2016) 33:2 Windsor YB Access to Justice 263. See also Amy Salyzyn, Jacquelyn Burkell, Emma Costain & Brandon Piva. “What Makes Court Forms Complex? Studying Empirical Support for a Functional Literacy Approach” (2019) 15:1 Journal of Law & Equality 31.

105 Rebecca L Sandefur, “Fulcrum Point of Equal Access to Justice: Legal and Nonlegal Institutions of Remedy” (2009) 42:1 Loyola Los Angeles L Rev 949 [Sandefur, “Fulcrum Point of Equal Access to Justice”].

106 Pascoe Pleasance, Nigel J Balmer & Stian Reimers, “Horses for Courses? People’s Characterization of Justiciable Problems and the Use of Lawyers” (conference paper, not currently available to the authors) as discussed and quoted in Baxter, Trebilcock & Yoon, supra note 73 at 71-2.

107 Baxter, Trebilcock & Yoon, supra note 73 at 72.

108 Community Legal Education Ontario, Building an Understanding of Legal Capability: An online scan of legal capability research (Toronto: Community Legal Education, Ontario, September 2016) at 17, online (pdf): CLEO Connect www.cleoconnect.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/online-scan-legal-capability.September-2016.final_.pdf [CLEO, Building an Understanding of Legal Capability].

109 Ibid. at 2. See also Martin Jones, Legal Capability (London: PLENET, 2010), online (pdf): Law For Life www.lawforlife.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/legal-capability-plenet-2009-147-1-147.pdf.

110 Community Legal Education Ontario Centre for Research & Innovation, “Don’t smoke, don’t be poor, read before signing: Linking health literacy and legal capability” (Toronto: Community Legal Education Ontario, April 2015), online (pdf): CLEO Connect www.cleoconnect.ca/resource/research/dont-smoke-dont-be-poor-read-before-signing-linking-health-literacy-and-legal-capability/ [CLEO, “Don’t smoke”].

111 Currie, Nudging the Paradigm Shift, supra note 1 at 29.

112 For instance, as cited in Currie, “Nudging the Paradigm”, supra note 1; Nigel J Balmer, Alexy Buck, Ash Patel, Catrina Denvir, Pascoe Pleasence, Knowledge, capability and the experience of rights problems (London: PLENET & Legal Services Research Centre, March 2010), online (pdf): Law For Life lawforlife.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/knowledge-capability-and-the-experience-of-rights-problems-lsrc-may-2010-255.pdf; and Hugh M McDonald & Julie People, “Legal capability and inaction for legal problems: knowledge, stress and cost” Updating justice 14 (June 2014), online (pdf): Law and Justice Foundation of New South Wales www.lawfoundation.net.au/ljf/site/templates/UpdatingJustice/$file/UJ_41_Legal_capability_and_inaction_for_legal_problems_FINAL.pdf. More recently, see Legal Services Board, Reshaping Legal Services to Meet People’s Needs: An Analysis of Legal Capability (Legal Services Board (UK), February 2020), online (pdf): www.legalservicesboard.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/PLE-Reshaping-Legal-Services.pdf.

113 Currie, Nudging the Paradigm Shift, supra note 1 at 30, 35 and 38.

114 Trevor Farrow & Les Jacobs, “Introduction, Taking Meaningful Access to Justice in Canada Seriously” in Trevor Farrow & Les Jacobs, eds, The Justice Crisis: The Cost and Value of Accessing Justice (UBC Press: Vancouver, 2020) [Farrow & Jacobs, “Introduction”].

115 Ibid. at 7.

116 Ibid. at 8–9.

117 Ibid. at 8 [footnotes omitted].

118 Jones, supra note 109 at 1.

119 Stephen Golub, “Introduction: Legal Empowerment’s Approaches and Importance”, Justice Initiative (Autumn 2013) 5, online (pdf): Open Society Justice Initiative www.opensocietyfoundations.org/publications/justice-initiatives-legal-empowerment [Open Society Justice Initiative].

120 See Stephen Golub, “Beyond Rule of Law Orthodoxy: The Legal Empowerment Alternative” (2003) Rule of Law Series: Democracy and Rule of Law Project Working Paper No. 41, online (pdf): Carnegie Endowment for International Peace www.carnegieendowment.org/files/wp41.pdf.

121 For a review of a number of legal empowerment initiatives involving community paralegals, see Open Society Justice Initiative, supra note 119.

122 For a comprehensive meta-review of legal empowerment programs and strategies, see Laura Goodwin and Vivek Maru, “What do we know about legal empowerment? Mapping the Evidence” (2014) 8 Namati Working Paper, online (pdf): Namati www.namati.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Evidence-Review2.pdf.

123 Maloney, supra note 63 at 69.

124 Peter Chapman, “The Legal Empowerment Movement and Its Implications” (2018) 87: 1 Fordham Law Review Online 183.