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The goal of this article is to better understand the potential of tribunals to improve access to justice in Canada. It begins by defining “tribunals” and “access to justice”, the key concepts of this article. Because tribunals and trial courts are functional alternatives for the resolution of many legal disputes, the article first reviews the merits of trial-level courts in this regard. It then turns to tribunals, reviewing some objective evidence of tribunal excellence in creating access to justice. Four key attributes of tribunals make them advantageous alternatives to trial-level courts for the accessible and just resolution of many types of legal dispute. First, tribunals are specialized instead of having general jurisdiction. Second, tribunals apply teamwork to dispute-resolution, instead of assigning all responsibility to individual adjudicators. Third, healthy forms of accountability are easier to establish in tribunals than they are in courts. This includes accountability of individual members to the tribunal and accountability of the tribunal to the legislature that created it. Finally, tribunals can be designed for maximal performance in creating access to justice, by contrast to courts which, for good reasons, resist design or reform efforts coming from outside themselves. The final Part of the article argues that tribunals can advance access to justice not only by taking on dispute-resolution work that courts would otherwise do, but also by offering authoritative legal vindication of rights that would otherwise be abandoned, or resolved in a completely privatized way. The tribunal promise of accessible adjudication can also be expected to improve the quality of settlements, in terms of upholding parties’ substantive legal rights.

Welfarism is the idea that government should always try to make individuals’ lives go better, for them, than they otherwise would, overall. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate welfarism’s compatibility with, and potential to support, the ambitions of person-centred justice. Welfarism is a normative theory applicable to public policy generally, but one which has distinct consequences in the realm of law and legal systems. They are considered just to the extent that they generate the best possible expected welfare consequences for all of the individuals who are affected by them. Welfarism is radically person-centred because it requires lawmakers to treat each individual affected by their work as a distinct locus of value, including those who have been subordinated or ignored., RésuméLe welfarisme est l’idée selon laquelle le gouvernement devrait toujours essayer d’améliorer la vie des individus, et ce, d’une manière à ce que la qualité de vie des individus soit supérieure à ce qu’elle l’aurait été sans ladite intervention gouvernementale. Dans cette voie, l’objectif de cet article est de démontrer la compatibilité du welfarisme avec les ambitions d’une justice centrée sur la personne et son potentiel pour soutenir cette forme de justice. Le welfarisme est une théorie normative applicable aux politiques publiques en général, mais qui entraîne toutefois des conséquences distinctes dans le domaine du droit et des systèmes juridiques. Les lois sont alors considérées comme justes si elles génèrent les meilleures conséquences possibles en termes de bien-être pour tous les individus qui sont affectés par celles-ci. Le welfarisme est radicalement centré sur la personne, car il exige que les législateurs traitent chaque individu affecté par leur travail comme un lieu de valeur distinct, y compris celles et ceux qui ont été subordonnés ou ignorés.

Noel Semple - The Inaccessibility of Justice in Ontario’s Adjudicative Tribunals: Symptoms and Diagnosis

Which individuals should count in a welfare-consequentialist analysis of public policy? Some answers to this question are parochial, and others are more inclusive. The most inclusive possible answer is ‘everybody to count for one.’ In other words, all individuals who are capable of having welfare – including foreigners, the unborn, and non-human animals – should be weighed equally. This article argues that ‘who should count’ is a question that requires a two-level answer. On the first level, a specification of welfare-consequentialism serves as an ethical ideal, a claim about the attributes that the ideal policy would have. ‘Everybody to count for one’ might succeed on this level. However, on the second level is the welfare-consequentialist analysis procedure used by human analysts to give advice on real policy questions. For epistemic reasons, the analysis procedure should be more parochial than ‘everybody to count for one.’

This article is about two ideologies. Welfare-consequentialism holds that government should adopt the policies that can rationally be expected to maximise aggregate welfare. Populism holds that society is divided into a pure people and a corrupt elite, and asserts that public policy should express the general will of the people. The responses of world governments to the coronavirus pandemic have clearly illustrated the contrast between these ideologies, and the danger that populist government poses to human wellbeing. The article argues that welfare-consequentialism offers a vaccine for populism. First, it rebuts populism’s claims about who government is for and what it should do. Second, the pessimism and distrust that make people crave populism can be satiated by successful welfare-consequentialist government. Finally, welfare-consequentialism’s sunny narrative of progress can be just as compelling to people as populism’s dark story has proven to be.

“Personal plight” is the sector of the legal services industry in which the clients are individuals, and the legal needs arise from disputes. This article proposes that competition among personal plight law firms is suppressed by three demand-side phenomena. First, consumers confront high search costs. Identifying competing law firms willing and able to provide the needed services often requires significant expenditure of temporal and psychological resources. Second, comparable price and quality information about firms is scarce for consumers. Both of these factors impede comparison shopping and reduce competitive pressure on firms. A third competition-suppressing factor is observed in tort legal service markets, where offerings are typically priced on a contingency basis. Contingency fees have relatively low salience to consumers, and this reduces consumers’ willingness to negotiate and comparison-shop on the basis of price. This analysis is supported by the author’s empirical research with Ontario personal plight lawyers as well as the existing literature. The article concludes by suggesting possible consequences of this analysis for regulatory policy.

When lawyers elect the leaders of their self-regulatory organizations, what sort of people do they vote for? How do the selection processes for elite lawyer sub-groups affect the diversity and efficacy of those groups? This article quantitatively assesses the demographic and professional diversity of leadership in the Law Society of Upper Canada. After many years of underrepresentation, in 2015 visible minority members and women were elected in numbers proportionate to their shares of Ontario lawyers. Regression analysis suggests that being non-white was not a disadvantage in the 2015 election, and being female actually conferred an advantage in attracting lawyers’ votes. The diverse employment contexts of the province’s lawyers were also represented in the elected group. However, early-career lawyers were completely unrepresented. This is largely a consequence of electoral system design choices, and can be remedied through the implementation of career-stage constituencies. The Law Society’s “benchers” are more demographically diverse than other elite lawyer sub-groups, such as judges, and the open and transparent selection process may be part of the reason. , Lorsque les avocats élisent les chefs de leurs organismes d’auto-réglementation, quel genre de leader choisissent-ils? Quelles sont les répercussions des processus de sélection des sous-groupes d’avocats élites en ce qui concerne la diversité et l’efficacité au sein de ces groupes? Le présent article effectue une évaluation quantitative de la démographie et de la diversité professionnelle du leadership du Barreau du Haut-Canada. Après de nombreuses années de sous-représentation, en 2015, des membres de minorités visibles et des femmes ont été élus dans une proportion représentative de leur importance dans la profession en Ontario. Une analyse de régression permet de conclure que, dans l’élection de 2015, ne pas être de race blanche n’était pas un handicap, et qu’être femme était avantageux en ce que cela suscitait davantage de votes. La diversité des contextes d’emploi des avocats en Ontario était également bien représentée parmi les élus. Par contre, les avocats frais émoulus n’étaient pas représentés du tout, du fait de décisions prises dans la conception du système de vote. Cet inconvénient peut être remédié par la création d’une catégorie correspondant aux étapes de carrière. Les conseillers au barreau du Barreau du Haut-Canada constituent un groupe plus diversifié sur le plan démographique que d’autres sous-groupes d’avocats élites, notamment les juges, ce qui pourrait relever en partie du processus de sélection ouvert et transparent.