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: […]

I discovered the other day, while in my daily business of tracking down the wild and radical of lawyering in North America, that Jimmy Carter once unapologetically excoriated the legal profession for being full of itself. He did this in a speech to the Los Angeles County Bar Association. At its 100th anniversary celebration. […]

Among the abundant benefits of my Fulbright is the hands-off freedom I get to pursue almost any idea or possibility I please. Although the grant is not entirely unrestricted—I’m supposed to stay in Canada as much as I can and must turn in two very, very brief (i.e., one paragraph) reports on what I’ve […]

Yesterday, in a short, frustrated entry on promulgation, I forgot to mention a curious nuance that nobody seems to talk about—the promulgation of bad law. All the time, state and federal courts are discovering, with the help of scrutinous litigants, that certain legislation is unconstitutional. But, as the courts are striking these laws […]

Ages ago, I promised to provide a link from this blog to my other, high-minded “research blog” once it reached a kind of equilibrium. It has begun chugging along, and I’ve just posted a history of the Vancouver-based People’s Law School, which I’ll be visiting next month. To read it, and to keep […]

More conference proceedings, to tide you over until I polish off more of the usual, self-important essays. This is off the cover of the proceedings of a June 1979 seminar held at the Caulfield Institute of Technology near Melbourne, Victoria, Australia and entitled “Community Legal Education: Preventive Legal Aid”:

I didn’t think you could wait another day without more lost-and-found conference proceedings masterpieces. Here’s one from Robert Cooper (who I think may be this guy), a Canadian lawyer who in the late 70s was the CBC’s “Ombudsman” and gave remarks at an April 1977 public legal education conference at the University of Ottawa:
After […]

In June 1975 about 300 key stakeholders from throughout Canada and North America gathered in Victoria, British Columbia, for a national conference on Canadian legal aid. The conference covered three days and treated a raft of topics, but among four major addresses to the conference were remarks by Morgan Ellsworth, then president of the […]

It’s my first full week of full-time research, and I’ve been spending some grueling hours coalescing with my laptop, a web-based citation manager, and the NEOS Library Consortium’s catalogue. The University of Alberta Libraries, a part of the NEOS Consortium, hold what are very possibly the world’s largest archives of community and public legal […]

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 […]