Andrew Pilliar (Thompson Rivers University Faculty of Law) has posted Filling the Normative Hole at the Centre of Access to Justice: Toward a Person-Centred Conception ((2022) 55:1 UBC Law Review 149) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Access to justice is often described as a significant problem, but it lacks a well-developed normative framework to understand and address the problem. This paper interrogates and critiques two leading conceptions of access to justice in Canada: one found in caselaw, the second found in contemporary academic work, public reports, and extra-judicial writing. While these conceptions differ from each other, both are ultimately constrained by a normative dependence on the rule of law and other institutional commitments that make them insufficient to respond to the scope of access to justice problems. This paper offers a new conception of access to justice that transcends these limitations by focussing on the people who experience access to justice problems. This person-centred conception of access to justice draws on Martha Fineman’s vulnerability theory to posit a normative approach that is both universal in scope and is also sensitive to the context of particular individuals. The paper elaborates this person-centred conception and also discusses some implications of this approach for the Canadian legal system.
