Action Committee Logo go
Looking for the Access to
Justice Research Network
(AJRN)? Click here

Month: July 2019

Posted on

Justice For All

“Justice for All” is the title of a recently published report on access to justice that officially launched in Canada on May 30, 2019 at the Global Center for Pluralism in Ottawa.[1] The report was published by the Task Force on Justice. The Task Force is an initiative of the Pathfinders for Peaceful, Just and Inclusive Societies, a group of member states working towards a shared vision of how United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 16.0—Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development; provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels—can be delivered. The Pathfinders have placed access to justice at the core of the effort to implement SDG 16. Their work further serves to highlight access to justice elements of the other 16 UN Sustainable Development Goals.[2]

The Justice for All Report Canadian launch event featured prominent global leaders, who each spoke to key findings in the report and the urgency of addressing the worldwide access to justice problem.  The main speakers at the event were Mary Robinson, former Prime Minister of Ireland and Chair of the Elders,[3] Nathalie Drouin, Deputy Minister of Justice in the Government of Canada and Allyson Maynard-Gibson former Minister of Justice and Attorney General of the Bahamas. The International Development Research Centre, The World Bank, The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, The United Nations Development Program and the Open Society Justice Initiative are among the 26 international partners in the initiative. The Canadian launch was sponsored jointly by the International Development Research Centre, a branch of Foreign Affairs Canada and the Task Force on Justice.

The Justice for All initiative is one of bold intent. At the heart of the Justice for All vision is the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, a roadmap endorsed by the UN’s more than 190 member countries in 2015 to help create a “just, equitable, tolerant and socially inclusive world”. Justice is a thread that runs through all 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. In addition, it should be noted that the 2030 Agenda represents the first time that the United Nations has included a target that directly addresses access to justice in its global plan for action. Specifically, SDG 16.3 calls for equal justice for all by the year 2030.

The agenda for action of the Task Force is built around several overarching themes:

– Resolving the justice problems that matter most to people

– Preventing justice problems

– Creating opportunities for people to fully participate in their societies and economies; and

– Investing in justice institutions that work for people and that respond to their needs for justice.

Supporting national implementation of justice initiatives, increasing justice leadership, measuring progress, intensifying cooperation and building the global movement are also important parts of the agenda.

True to their name, the Task Force is a catalyst for concerted action. Though they are less involved in on-the-ground justice initiatives, they are helping to promote action on access to justice by advancing a global movement that is helping to raise awareness of the seriousness of the global crisis in access to justice, and bringing the importance of improving access to justice worldwide to the forefront of public consciousness and discourse. Doubtless, particular needs and solutions will exist in different parts of the world. In one jurisdiction legal identity documents and land titles may be fundamental problems blocking social development; in another, cost or timely access due to crowded dockets may be the main barriers limiting access to civil courts. The Task Force’s efforts recognize the complexity and diversity of the access to justice problem. In Canada, where provincial/territorial, national and international endeavors continue to work to move the dial on improving access to justice,  the added attention that the Task Force’s “Justice for All” report launch in Canada has brought is welcomed.

The cost of injustice is one of the main areas of concentration in the work of the Task Force. As pertains to this topic, the work of the Canadian Forum on Civil Justice (CFCJ) features prominently in the Task Force report. The CFCJ’s contributions include data from the national survey of Everyday Legal Problems and the Cost of Justice (2016) and a specially commissioned report on Costing the Justice Gap: Return on Investment for Justice Services by Civil Society Organizations (forthcoming 2019).

The work of the Task Force on Justice and the Pathfinders for Peaceful, Just and Inclusive Societies as well as other international organizations over the past few years since the United Nations issued its 2030 Agenda is encouraging. These efforts have applied the empirical research from the body of legal problems research conducted over the past 25 years and the policy implications that have flowed from this collection of socio-legal restudies to inform further research as well as to help, reenergize the access to justice movement.  This includes building on early work from Canadians like Ab Currie and others to help push a recognition of the importance of public-centered efforts and the recognition of everyday legal problems as a central area of focus for legal institutions and legal reforms. The CFCJ’s ongoing efforts and support for the Task Force, the Pathfinder’s, the work of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and other initiatives, as well as the Canadian Action Committee on Access to Justice in Civil and Family Matters (also featured in the “Justice for All” report) continue to be directed toward important, public-first, meaningful, justice-for-all goals and research efforts. Readers are encouraged to read Justice for All: The Report of the Task Force on Justice, April 2019 accessible at https://www.justice.sdg16.plus/report.

[1] The Justice for All report was published on April 29, 2019. See Task Force on Justice, Press Release, “Justice Systems Fail to Help 1.5 Billion People Resolve Their Justice Problems, New Global Report Finds” (29 April 2019) online: Pathfinders for Peaceful, Justice and Inclusive Societies <https://www.justice.sdg16.plus/report>.

[2] For the complete list of UN Sustainable Development Goals, see “United Nations Sustainable Development Goals Knowledge Platform”, online: United Nations <https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdgs>.

[3] The Elders is an international, non-governmental organization of prominent public figures brought together by Nelson Mandela in 2007. For more information about The Elders, see “Who we are” online: The Elders <https://www.theelders.org>.

Posted on

2019 International Legal Aid Group Meeting in Ottawa

The semi-annual meeting of the International Legal Aid Group (ILAG) was held in Ottawa in June from June 17 to 19, 2019. ILAG conferences are held every two years in a different country. The last time that an ILAG conference was held in Canada was in 1999 in Vancouver. This conference was hosted by Legal Aid Ontario which did an outstanding job of organizing the local events and venues, including a visit to the Supreme Court and the main conference dinner at the Museum of History.

A number of sessions contributed to the overall theme of the conference, Legal Aid as a Public Service: Is it Achievable? These included highly informative presentations about the use of technology in achieving access to justice, quality assurance in the delivery of legal services and assisting unrepresented litigants. In particular, a session on exploring gaps in the provision of services to vulnerable people highlighted the enormous scale and the creative strategies in bringing access to justice to the population of India.

There was substantial involvement by Canadian presenters. Catherine Coulter from Denton spoke about pro bono legal services in Ontario and, in the same session, Trevor Farrow from the Canadian Forum on Civil Justice spoke about professional ethics and obligations involved in access to justice and the public interest. David McKillop talked about on-going efforts at Legal Aid Ontario to meet the needs of diverse groups. Nick Summers from Newfoundland and Megan Longley from Nova Scotia gave a presentation illustrating the diversity of legal aid provision in Canada. In the same session, Karen Wilford from the NWT talked about the how the geographic and environmental factors combine with the legacy of colonialism shape the delivery of legal aid in Canada’s arctic region. Michele Leering from the Community Advocacy and Legal Centre in eastern Ontario spoke about a project currently underway in that province to advance health-justice partnerships in Ontario in a session that also included presentations about similar developments in Australia and the UK. In another session on technology and access Sherry MacLennan from the Legal Services Society of B.C. spoke about impressive developments in on-line dispute resolution for marginalized people in British Columbia. Nye Thomas and Ryan Fritch from the Law Commission of Ontario spoke about the potential impact of artificial intelligence and automated decision-making on access to justice.

In all the conference included 29 presentations in 9 sessions plus national reports. These will be available on the ILAG web site, along with papers from the previous ILAG conference held in South Africa, the ILAG Newsletter and articles about developments in legal aid. Readers are encouraged to access the ILAG web site at www.internationallegalaidgroup.org/  The International Legal Aid Group held its first meeting in the Netherlands 1994. It is the oldest international organization addressing legal aid and, more broadly, access to justice issues. ILAG remains the pre-eminent organization of academics, researchers and policy makers dedicated to sharing information about legal aid. It continues expand its international reach as the global access to justice landscape changes and is a source of valuable information and perspective on access to justice issues.

Posted on

Facilitating Access to Justice Through Innovation

Many people experience civil justice problems, but few involve the courts. Rebecca Sandefur, an associate professor of sociology and law at the University of Illinois, has researched the frequency of justice problems and found that less than a quarter of Americans experiencing civil justice issues used the courts to resolve their disputes.[1] Findings from the Canadian Forum on Civil Justice’s national “Cost of Justice” survey also found that while 95% of adults in Canada try to do something about their civil and family justice problems, only about 7% appear before courts or tribunals to resolve their problems.[2]

Legal scholars have documented a large justice gap in North America, which sees many low- and middle- income individuals experience significant challenges engaging legal help to resolve their everyday legal problems through the formal justice system, as well as through other means. Recent research further reveals the extent of the global justice gap. The 2019 Innovating Justice report by HiiL and the Task Force on Justice indicates that overall, two-thirds of the world’s population lacks meaningful access to justice. [3]

There are significant consequences to untreated civil justice issues, in terms of both personal and societal costs.[4] Legal problems also result in other significant issues in people’s lives, including job loss, poor health, and housing instability.[5]

Innovation to Address Unmet Legal Needs

To address the global access to justice problem, we cannot keep going down the same path. It is important to challenge the status quo and adopt new ways of facilitating access to justice. Transitions in technology, the economy, and the legal profession make changes in justice systems inevitable. Gillian Hadfield, renowned professor of Law and Economics, posits that the legal system needs “a revolution of change”. [6] Similarly, in a recent blog post, Chief Justice of British Columbia, the Honourable Robert Bauman, encouraged lawyers to embrace disruptive changes in law.[7]

Disruption should be welcomed, as it provides new opportunities for developing innovative approaches to legal service delivery. There is a large group of people with unmet legal needs that are not being addressed in the current system. New models of legal assistance need to be adopted to meet the existing demand for services. Innovation does not solely rely on building new technology, it can also involve changes in where services are delivered and how legal professionals provide assistance. Other innovations may involve modifying the organizational structure of courts, law societies, and law firms. Overall, innovation is about rethinking what the justice system does and how it does it.

To find solutions, we need to change our beliefs and assumptions about the justice system. The Task Force on Justice describes this process as developing “new mental models”.[8] Using new approaches, we can build technologies and services to help close the justice gap. Creative ideas for delivering legal services are key to facilitating access to justice.

Canadian Justice Sector Innovations

Justice systems across Canada are also finding innovative ways to improve access to justice. One recent example is the Wellington County Mobile Legal Service in Ontario.[9] This initiative, which is being run by the Legal Clinic of Guelph and Wellington County, offers free legal advice to people residing in the region who would not otherwise be able to readily access legal help. The service operates through a van which drives around the county. People seeking legal advice connect with outreach workers in the van, who then skype a caseworker from the clinic to do a consultation. Taking legal services beyond the office and on the road is a simple idea but has a huge impact on people living in rural areas.

Another approach that has shown promise is Ontario’s One Judge Model pilot project. [10] This initiative, which launched in February 2019, was put in place to help speed up civil justice cases heard in the Superior Court. Parties will be assigned a case management judge depending on a number of factors, including the case’s complexity and public importance.  For approved cases, one case management judge is present at pre-trial hearings, case-management conferences, and trial. The case management judge controls the pace of the proceeding by assigning a trial date and imposing a schedule for completing necessary steps. By controlling the behavior of parties, ensuring the litigants meet deadlines, and resolving pre-trial disputes, this form of case management helps to save time and money. An additional benefit of the One Judge Model is that judges can become very familiar with the parties’ dispute. This allows for greater efficiency because only one judge needs to learn about the issues involved in the case, rather than the multiple judges usually involved. As this is only a pilot project, it is not available everywhere in Ontario and not all cases will qualify.

British Columbia took a different approach to court system efficiency, by adopting an innovative new method of dispute resolution that avoids judges and courtrooms all together. The province launched Canada’s first online tribunal in 2012.[11] The Civil Resolution Tribunal (CRT) began as a way to resolve condo disputes but has since expanded to small claims and motor vehicle accident injury disputes. The easy-to-use website helps users classify their disputes, identifies the correct application form, and guides them through the process. All of the tribunal’s services are available online, with paper forms available for people who do not have access to computers or who cannot use them. The CRT is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and all steps in the process can be done when convenient for the user. The focus of the CRT is on participants finding a resolution through negotiation. A CRT member will only make a decision about the dispute if the parties cannot come to an agreement with the help of a case manager. Most participants can resolve disputes in ninety days for about $200.[12] In May 2019, over 9,000 disputes were resolved using the CRT, with 72% of users likely to recommend the website to others.[13] This innovative method of legal service delivery allows people greater access to dispute resolution, while focusing on party driven outcomes.

Lessons from Other Countries

There are many opportunities for adopting innovative ideas from jurisdictions outside of Canada. Additionally, there are many initiatives in Canada that are challenging traditional ways of providing legal services and providing innovative new methods. In expanding these programs, the country should follow the recommendations of the Task Force to ensure that innovations contribute to access to justice.

The report by the Task Force features examples of innovations in the provision of legal services that are happening worldwide. While British Columbia uses online dispute resolution (ODR) for some disputes, ODR could be used more broadly throughout Canada. In other jurisdictions online platforms help guide parties through divorces, and help them work towards a fair agreement.[14] In China the use of ODR has expanded to include commercial and intellectual property disputes involving the internet.[15] This expansion of the use of ODR can offer new ways to speed up dispute resolution and can prove to be an accessible way for people who live in rural areas, or who have difficulties accessing the courts, to resolve their legal problems.

This blog has presented only a few examples of the ways that innovative changes in the delivery of legal services can help to improve access to justice in Canada (and in other jurisdictions). Access to civil justice continues to be a significant global problem and an increasing body of evidence demonstrates a growing justice gap. It is time to begin thinking differently about our approach to access to justice. Hopefully, the comments presented here have served to illustrate what is possible and what is needed to move towards closing the justice gap.

 

[1] Rebecca L Sandefur, “Americans’ Experience with Civil Justice Problems and the Role of Civil Legal Assistance” (Research presentation to the inaugural meeting of the White House Legal Aid Interagency Roundtable, US Department of Justice, 29 February 2016) at 3, online: LegalAidResearch.org <http://legalaidresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/Sandefur_Americans-Experience-with-Civil-Justice-Problems-and-the-Role-of-Civil-Legal-Assistance.pdf>.

 

[2] Trevor C.W. Farrow, Ab Currie, Nicole Aylwin, Les Jacobs, David Northrup and Lisa Moore, Everyday Legal Problems and the Cost of Justice in Canada: Overview Report (Toronto: Canadian Forum on Civil Justice, 2016) at 9, online: CFCJ <https://www.cfcj-fcjc.org/sites/default/files/Everyday%20Legal%20Problems%20and%20the%20Cost%20of%20Justice%20in%20Canada%20-%20Overview%20Report.pdf>.

 

[3] Innovation Working Group of the Task Force on Justice, Innovating Justice: Needed and Possible (The Hague, Netherlands: HiiL, 2019), online: <hiil.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Task-Force-on-Justice-Innovating-Working-Group-Report.pdf> [Innovation Working Group].

 

[4] See for example, Ab Currie, The Legal Problems of Everyday Life The Nature, Extent and Consequences of Justiciable Problems Experienced by Canadians (Ottawa: Department of Justice Canada, 2009), online: Department of Justice <https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/csj-sjc/jsp-sjp/rr07_la1-rr07_aj1/rr07_la1.pdf>.

 

[5] See for example, Lisa Moore, Ab Currie, Nicole Aylwin, Trevor C.W. Farrow and Paul Di Libero, The Cost of Experiencing Everyday Legal Problems Related to Physical and Mental Health (Toronto: Canadian Forum on Civil Justice, 2017), online: CFCJ <https://cfcj-fcjc.org/sites/default/files/docs/The%20Cost%20of%20Experiencing%20Everyday%20Legal%20Problems%20Related%20to%20Physical%20and%20Mental%20Health.pdf>; See further, Lisa Moore, Ab Currie, Nicole Aylwin and Trevor C.W. Farrow, The Cost of Experiencing Everyday Legal Problems Related to Loss of Employment and Loss of Housing (Toronto: Canadian Forum on Civil Justice, 2017), online: CFCJ < https://cfcj-fcjc.org/sites/default/files/docs/The%20Cost%20of%20Experiencing%20Everyday%20Legal%20Problems%20Related%20to%20Loss
%20of%20Employment%20and%20Loss%20of%20Housing.pdf>.

 

[6] Ian Mulgrew. “Ian Mulgrew: Legal system needs a revolution to deal with digital economy, says expert”, Vancouver Sun (16 May 2019), online: Vancouver Sun <https://vancouversun.com/opinion/columnists/ian-mulgrew-legal-system-needs-a-revolution-to-deal-with-digital-economy-says-expert>.

 

[7] Honourable Robert Bauman, “It’s the Economy, Stupid” (29 May 2019), online (blog): NSRLP <https://representingyourselfcanada.com/its-the-economy-stupid/>.

 

[8] Innovation Working Group, supra note 3 at 6.

 

[9] Anam Khan, “Law van delivers free access to legal advice throughout Wellington County” GuelphToday (3 June 2019, online: GuelphToday <https://www.guelphtoday.com/local-news/law-van-offers-free-access-to-justice-to-people-in-rural-areas-1487125>; CBC News, “Mobile legal clinics coming to rural Wellington” CBC News (22 January 2019), online: CBC News <https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/mobile-legal-clinics-coming-to-rural-wellington-1.4979593>.

 

[10] Aidan Macnab, “Pilot launched to speed civil justice”, Canadian Lawyer Magazine (30 January 2019), online: Canadian Lawyer Magazine <canadianlawyermag.com/legalfeeds/author/aidan-macnab/pilot-launched-to-speed-civil-justice-16791/>; Superior Court of Justice, “Practice Advisory Concerning the Provincial Civil Case Management Pilot – One Judge Model” (1 February 2019), online: Superior Court of Justice <ontariocourts.ca/scj/practice/civil-case-management-pilot/>; Judiciary Committee of the American College of Trial Lawyers, “Working Smarter but Not Harder in Canada: The Development of a Unified Approach to Case Management in Civil Litigation” (2016), online: The Society of Ontario Adjudicators and Regulators <https://soar.on.ca/sites/default/files/documents/ACTL.Cda_.Working_Smarter_Not_Harder_compressed.pdf>.

 

[11] Civil Resolution Tribunal, “Starting a Dispute”, online: Civil Resolution Tribunal <ontariocourts.ca/scj/practice/civil-case-management-pilot/>; Bill Henderson, “Is access to justice a design problem?”, Legal Evolution (23 June 2019), online: Legal Evolution <ontariocourts.ca/scj/practice/civil-case-management-pilot/>; British Columbia, “The Civil Resolution Tribunal and Strata Disputes” (31 May 2017), online: Government of British Columbia <https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/housing-tenancy/strata-housing/resolving-disputes/the-civil-resolution-tribunal>.

 

[12] Shannon Salter, “Online Dispute Resolution and Justice System Integration: British Columbia’s Civil Resolution Tribunal” (2017) 34:1 Windsor YB Access Just 112, online: <https://wyaj.uwindsor.ca/index.php/wyaj/article/view/5008>.

 

[13] Civil Resolution Tribunal, “CRT Statistics Snapshot— May 2019”, online: Civil Resolution Tribunal <https://civilresolutionbc.ca/crt-statistics-snapshot-may-2019/>; Civil Resolution Tribunal, “Participant Satisfaction Survey— May 2019”, online: Civil Resolution Tribunal <https://civilresolutionbc.ca/participant-satisfaction-survey-may-2019/>.

 

[14] Innovation Working Group, supra note 3 at 13.

 

[15] Ibid; Sara Xia, “China’s Internet Courts are Spreading; Online Dispute Resolution is Working” (23 December 2018), online (blog): China Law Blog <https://www.chinalawblog.com/2018/12/chinas-internet-courts-are-spreading-online-dispute-resolution-is-working.html>.

 

Posted on

The Codify Project: Building a Free Database of Global Legislation

My name is John Wu. I’m a JD / MBA student between Osgoode Hall and Schulich School of Business. With my team, I’m currently building a free database of global legislation.

Why are you doing this?

I’m going to start off with a premise I hope most of you can get behind: legal information is difficult to access, and prohibitively expensive.

Anyone who has dealt with companies like Thomson Reuters or LexisNexis can attest to the steep costs of accessing their resources (for those who are unfamiliar, a pricing chart can be found here). While free resources are available through the good work of various legal information institutes, these alternatives are often seen as a poor man’s substitute to be used by small firms, non-profits, and organizations that cannot afford pricey subscriptions.

Over the course of the past year, I spoke to dozens of organizations being squeezed into this position, from human rights advocacy groups to resource providers for legal aid clinics. I heard the same story from almost everyone: lower budgets, and higher costs, leading to less resources being available.

This is problematic. Legal information should, in theory, be far more accessible than it currently is. The rule of law is premised on the idea that everyday citizens can access legal information, and subsequently understand the law. Despite this, the most useful legal resources are consistently being locked behind paywalls, under a business model that tries to extract as much value from each individual customer.

And these paywalls are getting higher. Based on 20 years of data from the Association of Research Libraries, subscription prices from major publishers have been, and are continuing to increase at an astounding rate. As a result, libraries across the country are cutting down on the resources they provide in an ongoing effort to manage costs.

Credit for these graphs go to Connor Campbell, JD Candidate 2020.

 

The rising cost of legal information goes against the general trends we’ve been observing almost everywhere else. After all, thanks to advances in technology, information collection and communication are easier than ever. This has transformed a once scarce resource into a sea of abundance, allowing for the creation of websites like YouTube and Wikipedia, which have revolutionized access to information across the globe.

Believing this same sort of transformation can happen with the law, we started the Codify Project. By creating a free database of global legislation, we hope to enable researchers to make more discoveries, assist lawmakers in drafting better laws, help legal professionals deliver better advice, and empower the everyday citizen to connect with the laws around them.

Wouldn’t that take decades of work?

While it may seem like a Herculean task for a team of two full-time employees, we have a secret weapon. The Codify System is an array of software which automatically scrapes, formats, and stores legal information.

You can think about the Codify System as a swarm of spiders, crawling 24/7 around the web to gather relevant info.

 

Once the information is stored, it is automatically updated by the Codify System whenever there is a change, whether it’s an amendment to a pre-existing law, or a new law being introduced. The database is therefore always up to date and grows even without human intervention.

Using the Codify System, which we developed with the support of Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP, we have built up the largest free database of Canadian legislation, containing all bills, regulations, and statutes, from every province and territory.

The current scope of our database includes bills, regulations, and statutes from all Canadian jurisdictions. It was recently expanded to capture bill information from the UK, US, and Australia.

 

Because we’re using an automation, we can make improvements to our system with each jurisdiction we complete, allowing our program to complete the next jurisdiction faster. Based on our current data ingestion schedule, we should have the complete data set for 4 countries completed by the end of 2019.

An additional benefit of using technology to do the work is that it drives our marginal cost down, far lower than if we were doing this manually. This is what allows us to make our database free for the public.

Why legislation?

We decided to focus on legislation for two reasons.

The first is the inaccessibility of legislation, despite it being “free” in theory. While there are a number of reasons why this is, including the use of dense legalese and the increasing use of omnibus bills, the heart of the issue lies in how fragmented legislation is.

Statutes, bills, and regulations are all published through different sources (Justice websites, legislative assemblies, and gazettes respectively). Thus, to piece together the puzzle, one must learn how to navigate and gather information from numerous online resources, many of which are painfully out of date.

By codifying all this information into a single, freely-accessible database, we are making the legislative schema more accessible not just for humans, who can now access all information types on a single website, but for machines as well.

The second part is very important. Machines have a very difficult time when it comes to gathering information from web pages. The distinction between content and code can be blurry, and semantic meaning is often lost when extracting text. With legislation, this problem is compounded due to the patchwork of publication standards and data types. This makes it very difficult to apply technologies such as language processors.

By extracting information from government websites and documents, and standardizing it into a machine-readable language, the Codify System makes the database that much more useful for the development of computer applications, allowing complex programs to be built with relatively little effort.

One example of what is possible is Codify Updates, a website we built to help legal professionals stay aware of changes to the law.

The Codify Updates landing page, designed by John Wu.

 

Twice a day, Codify Updates publishes every legislative change in Canada. With a free account, users can create customized feeds to track the laws that matter to them, set up live email alerts, and use the built-in search engine to discover new insights.

A few years ago, the idea of software automatically tracking every legislative change seemed implausible. With a machine-readable database, this is but one relatively simple example of what is possible.

You mentioned two reasons. What’s the second?

In addition to its inaccessibility, legislation was also interesting to us because it impacts such an enormous range of stakeholders. Beyond lawyers and researchers, it is vital to the work of politicians and administrators, HR representatives and compliance teams, lobbyists and grassroots activists and more.

With such a diverse and interesting group of communities, which have largely been cloistered up until now, we see a lot of potential in building an open platform where they can engage and interact with the data.

After all, there are countless use cases for a database of international legislation. Some examples we’ve thought of include: (1) a political website for keeping tabs on which bills a politician sponsored, (2) a compliance tool for federally regulated financial institutions, (3) a comparative law search engine, (4) the translation of English laws into braille and American sign language.

These are all fantastic use cases which are well within the realm of possibility, which we are unable to explore due to time and resource constraints. By engaging with these stakeholder groups and providing them with the data, we hope to enable them to execute on the use cases that matter to them, and further increase the reach of our database.

What is the endgame?

In 1984, the very first Hackers Conference was held in Marin County, California. Though a relatively obscure event at the time, this gathering of designers, programmers, and engineers planted the seed of modern cyberculture, bringing together numerous titans of industry, including Apple co-founder, Steve Wozniak, and the father of hypertext, Ted Nelson.

It was at this conference that the organizer, author Stewart Brand, uttered his now famous words: “Information wants to be free.”

Those present immediately seized upon this quote, transforming it into a battle cry for the relentless march of the internet. In the ensuing decades, the importance of this statement has only swelled, with some calling it “the single dominant ethic in [the digital] community”; and the “defining slogan of the information age.”

As catchy as the expression is, the actual quote, made during a discussion on intellectual property between Brand and Wozniak, was much more nuanced.

“On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”

Looking at the current state of the legal information market, it is worth reflecting on how this paradox has played out. On the one hand, there is more legal information available than ever before. Podcasts, blogs, and online legal guides have enabled countless legal professionals to share their knowledge with diverse audiences of lawyers and non-lawyers alike. And the digitization of laws has made it so that anyone can, at least in theory, see the laws of the land, without having to visit a courthouse library.

On the other hand, getting access to legal information, in the right time and place, has become more expensive than ever. Professionals are expected to get better information, and get it faster, to the point where judges feel comfortable penalizing lawyers for failing to use more sophisticated research tools. While a push to improve efficiency is not itself a bad thing, coupled with the high cost of legal information, this only creates further divisions between the haves and the have-nots, while strengthening the oligopoly of the big publishers.

We don’t expect this tension to disappear. But we hope the Codify Project will help shift the current dynamic. We believe it is the right of every citizen to have free and easy access to their laws. And through the power of technology and innovation, we have the means to provide it.

Where can I learn more?

If you would like to learn more, you can access our website here.

We are currently in the process of putting together a committee of industry leaders, to act as a preliminary board for the project. If you are interested in joining this committee, and want to learn more about its responsibilities and current membership, please email the author at john.wu@codifylegalpublishing.com.

John Wu, JD / MBA (Candidate), is the Director of Codify. As a law student in 2017, he was recognized by the Attorney General of Ontario as a rising star in legal-tech, and was given an award for his work in access to justice. Since then, he has founded an after-school program that brings legal education to local youth, as well as delivered presentations before the Ontario Bar Association Tech Expo and the Canadian Association of Law Librarians. Prior to entering law school, John worked as a researcher in the Department of Ophthalmology at St. Joseph’s Hospital. In his spare time, he enjoys watching science fiction and playing the guitar.