People-Centered Justice and the Civil-Criminal Divide
Lisa MooreWednesday, July 16, 2025
A considerable amount of Canadian legal scholarship exists within the boundaries of either civil or criminal law. Each camp generally invites separate consideration of gaps, standards, trends, shifts, and other issues. Rarely do these two domains of scholarship meet. A similar divide is apparent in legal practice, with the civil and criminal legal systems commonly viewed as separate arms within our broader legal machinery. There are certainly valid reasons for the siloing of these bodies of law. For those trained in law, the divide between civil and criminal law and the reasons for it will be clear, logical, and in most respects, likely perceived as necessary. Notwithstanding, there are various ways in which civil and criminal law converge – through legal problems that invoke both areas of law (for example, some family law cases, immigration law problems, etc.); through legal outcomes that jointly dispense civil compensation and criminal convictions; through publicly-funded legal services offering assistance in criminal and civil law matters; when a shortage of judges or available courtrooms demands decisions about which criminal and/or civil law cases will be delayed, potentially leading to impacts for litigants in both systems; and, in various other ways. Further, there are important connections that could and likely should be made between these two bodies of law, both in practice and in legal scholarship. While legal professionals and scholars might clearly identify these separate systems or advocate for treating civil and criminal law as distinct, research suggests that among low-income justice system users, no such divide exists and, instead, “Court is court. The law is the law. Lawyers are lawyers. Judges are judges.”[1]
Contemporary scholarship on the access to (civil) justice problem supports approaches to legal problem resolution that prioritize the perspectives of justice system users. That is, to address the crisis in access to justice, legal experts and scholars recommend redesigning justice to better meet people where they’re at to more effectively solve their legal (and related non-legal) problems. If, as research suggests, those most likely to navigate the legal system alone, or who may otherwise face the greatest access-to-justice barriers do not readily consider their legal problems in terms of either civil or criminal law, should more legal research and approaches to dispute resolution reflect a similarly broad conceptualization of legal problem experiences? Are there ways in which the civil-criminal divide inhibits progress towards better access to justice? Viewed through a people-centered justice lens, it follows that expanding legal research, problem identification, and dispute resolution to more seamlessly consider the potential criminal and civil dimensions of legal problems could advance earlier, less costly and more holistic legal problem resolution.
Legal needs scholarship offers additional arguments in support of this more expansive approach. Research reveals that people with experiences of either civil or criminal legal problems are not necessarily better equipped to identify legal problems belonging to either domain.[2] They also face the same obstacles to accessing legal information and assistance as people without previous justice system experience or legal problems. In this way, legal outreach and dispute resolution pathways aimed at identifying and addressing problems that may span the civil-criminal divide are a necessary part of the conversation on meaningful access to justice.
Decades of research on the access to justice problem has laid the groundwork for shifting our approach in legal research and practice to bridge the civil-criminal divide. This body of work confirms that legal problems are often complex and burdensome. That is, the journey from problem identification to problem resolution is commonly littered with obstacles and impacts that worsen with time. While less of this research in the Canadian context has examined the overlap between specific civil and criminal legal problems, there is some evidence from the Canadian Forum on Civil Justice (CFCJ) and others of problem clustering – legal problems that give rise to other types of legal problems or co-occur. For example, the CFCJ’s 2016 Everyday Legal Problems survey canvassed respondents about select criminal charges they faced within the three-year reference period of the survey. The data reveals that, even within the limited category of criminal law problems included in the survey, tens of thousands of adult respondents experienced concurrent criminal and civil legal problems.[3] As with most national legal needs surveys, the focus of the CFCJ’s Everyday Legal Problems survey was on the broader category of civil legal problems that make up the majority of legal problem experiences globally. As such, there was less follow-up on questions related to criminal charges, and most problem clusters identified in the dataset mirror the survey’s focus on civil legal problems. This is one example of an issue at the nexus of civil and criminal law for further investigation and analysis. Understanding the types of civil and criminal law problems that commonly co-occur, and investigating the extent and reasons for this co-occurrence can be helpful for identifying timely and effective pathways or opportunities to reasonably address both types of problems.
It is for this reason that the CFCJ will continue to explore this nexus and expand on this conversation in several upcoming publications.[4] Stay tuned!
[1] Lauren Sudeall and Ruth Richardson, “Unfamiliar Justice: Indigent Criminal Defendants’ Experiences with Civil Legal Needs” (2019) 52 U.C. Davis L. Rev. 2105 at 2107-2108.
[2] Ibid at 2106.
[3] Lisa Moore, Everyday Legal Problems and the Cost of Justice in Canada: Survey Data (Toronto: Canadian Forum on Civil Justice, 2018) at 104-105, online: CFCJ <https://cfcj-fcjc.org/wp-content/uploads/Everyday-Legal-Problems-and-the-Cost-of-Justice-in-Canada-Cost-of-Justice-Survey-Data.pdf>.
[4] Ab Currie, Trevor C.W. Farrow and Lisa Moore, “Representation Pathways in the Ontario Court of Justice” (2025) (forthcoming); Lisa Moore, Trevor C.W. Farrow and Ab Currie, “Measuring the Impacts of Legal Service Interventions: Final Report” (2025) (forthcoming).
**This blog was originally published on Slaw.ca on June 20, 2025: https://www.slaw.ca/2025/06/20/people-centered-justice-and-the-civil-criminal-divide/**