This blog is fighting a spell of mission drift. I anticipated this in post #1 and, what’s worse, readership has been declining since the drifting began (around Christmastime). So, with this post I will put myself to work on getting back to basics: public legal education.

What took me to Canada was a curiosity: a nationwide network of major, independent, nonprofit organizations each with a single purpose—educating the public about law. In the United States we don’t really have a network like that. Here’s my own sketch of the entities in the U.S. that work to help people understand law and legal issues:

The legal aid groups ended up roughly in the center because of the extent they tend to collaborate with others. And I do think legal aid in the U.S. serves as a nexus for PLE in many places; but the extent of its collaborativeness is also due to the limited amount of funding it has to work with.

In Canada, the picture looks much different:

The sole-purpose PLE organizations in Canada truly are working with nearly all of the players. In some places, this facilitates valuable crosstalk between the many people and groups that are interested in educating people about law. Though there are still ships passing in the night on certain issues, the independent PLE groups seem to be filling the triple role of matchmaker, cheerleader, and ideological anchor. How much duplicated effort is saved this way? How much more PLE is being done? Most importantly, are people able to make better day-to-day legal decisions because PLE is collectively “managed” like this?

(A note on the diagrams: they are first drafts and merely sketches. I’ve tried to show where there is a significant amount of collaboration by depicting overlap, and to approximate the amount of collaboration by the amount of overlap depicted. Size of a circle (most notably the extra-big Canadian independent PLE one) signifies nothing. I’ve simplified everything a lot, but I welcome even the harshest criticism.)