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Full-Text Articles in Law

Bend Or Break: Enhancing The Responsibilities Of Law Societies To Promote Access To Justice, Richard Devlin Frsc Jan 2016

Bend Or Break: Enhancing The Responsibilities Of Law Societies To Promote Access To Justice, Richard Devlin Frsc

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

There now appears to be a consensus in Canada that we have a serious access to justice problem. Chief Justices have been vocal. The Governor-General has made an intervention. Legal newspapers and websites have weekly, if not daily, stories on access to justice concerns. There have been several thorough reports which both detail the problems and propose possible paths forward. And one CEO of a national law firm has lamented that “access to justice is the legal profession’s equivalent of global warming.”

However, in my opinion, despite all this alarm, attention, and progress, two key components tend to be missing …


Class Warfare: The Disappearance Of Low-Income Litigants From The Civil Docket, Myriam Gilles Jan 2016

Class Warfare: The Disappearance Of Low-Income Litigants From The Civil Docket, Myriam Gilles

Articles

In recent years, much attention has been paid to the startling disparities in income and wealth in contemporary U.S. society. The enormous concentration of economic power in the top 1% is the culmination of decades of significant income and wealth gains for the top, combined with stagnant or decreasing growth for the majority - a trend that continues apace. But nowhere is the gap more glaring than in the civil docket, where class actions brought by or on behalf of low-income consumers and employees are on the verge of disappearing.

To be sure, the decline in class actions is only …