I have a grant to research “public legal education,” or “PLE,” in Canada. A lot of people have asked me just exactly what “PLE” is and just exactly what kind of research I’m doing of it. These same people are also interested to know what in the hell I’m going to do after I finish this research. This entry is for those people.

1. Public Legal Education in Canada

Those of us from the U.S. are familiar with a range of efforts by the legal profession and others to educate the public about law and build the people’s confidence in government and the legal profession. The heavy hitters are:

• Local, state, and national bar associations that coordinate attorney in the classroom programs, people’s law schools, pamphlets of all kinds, and legal information websites, as well as other innovative projects;
• Legal aid agencies, many of which provide pratical legal information in their offices, in workshops, and on their websites. (However, the Legal Services Corporation (LSC) now considers community legal education to be just one of a host of other “matters” that fall short of a real “case;” in fact, in a recent speech about access to justice and the importance of legal aid in the U.S., LSC president Helaine Barnett mentioned community legal education only in her published remarks, in a footnote (see 41 Idaho Law Review 403, 419 n.84 (2005));
• Educators at all levels who also contribute, teaching legal studies courses and incorporating law-related education (LRE) units into their instruction;
• Of course, law libraries (and the U.S. Legal Information Institute at Cornell), doing extensive work providing primary and secondary legal sources to the general public, along with legal research assistance and other programs;
• And then a big lot of commercial providers—Nolo Press, We the People, and LegalZoom are some of the notable players. (In fact, these commercial providers may actually be doing the majority of the practical work; that is, of the major community legal education sources in the U.S., I’d guess that the do-it-yourself forms and books companies are instructing far more people about the legal topics they really want to know about than the bar associations, educators, legal aid agencies, and law libraries are.)

In Canada, there is another, really heavy hitter: standalone organizations with “public legal education” their sole purpose. There is at least one of these organizations in each province and territory of Canada. They educate the public about law using a wide range of methods, developing programs customized for the practical needs of their communities. The sweep of these groups’ efforts is broad. In the words of my mentor here, Lois Gander (a PLE pioneer since the 1960s and now Canada’s leading PLE scholar), they “have adopted a range of objectives including preventive law, citizenship development, crime prevention, community development, and social reform.” Every year, millions of Canadian dollars support these organizations, which are funded primarily by Canadian IOLTA entities and by Justice Canada (the Canadian Department of Justice), which has undertaken to fund public legal education efforts since the 1970s and in 1984 established an “Access to Legal Information Fund.” There are no worldwide rankings, but it’s safe to say that Canada is a world leader in grassroots public legal education.

The U.S. is apparently not. While it’s not accurate to say that organizations like these don’t exist at all in the U.S., the standalone PLE model is hardly implanted there. Even though the modern community legal education movement was born in the U.S. (emerging out of federally funded community organizing and Neighborhood Legal Services components of the War on Poverty), PLE in America today is almost always a side-project of organizations that direct their main focus elsewhere. The standalone model affords Canadian PLE organizations the full-time attention of the attorneys and educators on their staffs and a clearly delineated network of sister agencies to collaborate with.

2. My Research

For a year, I will be investigating these standalone organizations. By design, my scope will be general: I want to determine what these organizations do, how they do it, and whether it works. During most of this fall, I will be holed up in the University of Alberta’s Legal Studies Program (my mentor Lois Gander’s shop and a working PLE provider and thinktank) and J.A. Weir Law Library, poring over the world’s largest Canadian PLE archives. By the end of October, I hope to have identified and dissected some of the most effective Canadian PLE programs and organizations from the past 40 years. In November, as the Canadian winter gets bitter, I will start travelling to several of the major standalone PLE organizations in Canada, snooping around their offices for two to three weeks at each. Finally, come the spring of 2007, I’ll crash into Edmonton again and spend a few months trying to make sense of everything I’ve seen during the year.

3. Then What?

After the archives review, the site visits, and then the analysis, it will be about the time that the Fulbright Program stops sending me checks. It will also be about the time that my Canadian work permit expires. I will have to return to the United States, and I hope that my return will be to Idaho.

Not surprisingly, my interest in public and community legal education is not an idle one. I have sought and won an ultracompetitive research grant and committed myself to a year of intensive research in a foreign country because I believe that community legal education is sorely underavailable in the U.S. Interesting efforts have been going on in Canada for several decades now, and I want to learn about the best aspects of the Canadian standalone PLE model and import them to Idaho.

To start an organization in Idaho whose sole purpose is to provide community legal education at street level will not be easy. I have been putting the basic pieces together for a couple years now, and have just begun looking for the big pieces: (1) an appropriate community location, (2) a list of allies, and (3) $$$. Fortunately, there are innovative people in Idaho and some national funders for new projects like the one I’m proposing. There is no doubt, though, that I will require lots of support, and I invite anyone reading this to drop me a line (leave a comment here if you don’t know my email address) with ideas or encouragement.