Self-represented litigants (SRLs) have repeatedly identified overly complex court forms as a major source of confusion and frustration. Digital guided pathways have been identified as one possible means to reduce barriers that the public experiences with court forms — but how effective are guided pathways as access to justice measures? Do they make court forms easier to fill out? If so, how can they be optimally designed and evaluated? This article reports on research seeking to answer these questions through a case study of family law guided pathways developed by Community Legal Education Ontario (CLEO). This study yielded two major conclusions. First, guided pathways can significantly reduce complexity for SRLs and, thus, other jurisdictions should consider adopting them as access-enhancing measures. Second, when designing and evaluating the design of court form guided pathways, a functional literacy framework, combined with user data and human testing, can be helpful in identifying barriers.

Witchcraft is a fascinating subject on which many volumes continue to be published. But not in Canada. This article stands in contrast to earlier Canadian pieces on witchcraft whose primary goals were to prove that the witchcraft provision marginalized women and to encourage legislators to repeal it. Parliament finally repealed the Canadian witchcraft prohibition in 2018. The moment is thus ripe to ask how—and why—this legislative oddity migrated from England into Canada. The first section of the paper considers the religious origins of the witchcraft prohibition in England and how it made its way into the Canadian Criminal Code. The second section explores how the prohibition evolved from one against unwanted spiritual practices to one against unwanted economic practices. The last section of the paper considers how witchcraft morphed into a viable Charter defence based on freedom of religion and why the prohibition against it was eventually repealed. In conclusion, the article reflects on the peculiar trajectory of witchcraft in Canada and what it might suggest not only about Canadian criminal law, but also about broader Canadian society.

The arrival of COVID-19 added potentially deadly consequences to incarceration. In response, jurisprudence developed allowing for some to be spared the deprivation of their liberty. However, there is insufficient empirical evidence that this avoidance of incarceration occurred in practice in Ontario. Using fieldwork methods conducted in Ontario criminal courts coupled with data from Statistics Canada, we investigate if a change in the use of incarceration during the COVID-19 pandemic occurred, and if friction emerged between those who may and may not espouse this new outlook. We find a notable and persistent decrease in the use of incarceration, that this was welcomed by many court actors but also that a fatigue with such leniency grew among others. We discuss what this fatigue might signify for the potential longevity of this more exceptional use of incarceration and more largely what this can signify about changes in Canada’s criminal justice system.

By drawing on civil chambers court observation data collected in the Vancouver Supreme Court of British Columbia, this article explores the relationship between institutional court practices and the emerging concept of person-centred justice. Despite some efforts at procedural reform, superior trial courts have been resistant to change, and access to justice challenges around cost, accessibility and complexity are stubbornly persistent. Rather than fulfilling normative visions of substantive and equal justice, several arguments and empirical studies build a compelling case that formalistic adjudicative venues such as the Supreme Court of British Columbia are vulnerable to reinforcing existing societal inequalities. Do the principles of person-centred justice—that promise to enable effective participation and engagement in justice processes—hold the answer to unlocking transformative institutional change? By engaging in a qualitative analysis that illuminates how time (or lack thereof) and relational proximity shapes institutional practices and resource distribution in Vancouver’s civil chambers courts, this article offers an initial foray into understanding what person-centricity might mean in an environment with deeply embedded institutional and epistemic practices traditionally dominated and captured by justice system professionals. By introducing qualitative evaluation of institutional practices in the civil courts of the Supreme Court of British Columbia, this article extends early conceptual debates about person-centred justice. This article further highlights the formidable challenges we face in embedding new social practices into relationally and materially unequal terrains.

In recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in self-represented family law litigants. This increase permeates courts in a variety of jurisdictions. It is also clear that self-represented litigants (SRLs) disproportionately suffer more negative outcomes than represented parties. Therefore, the question now is what the responses are and should be to this phenomenon. Like many other facets of access to justice, the solutions in the family law context must be both diverse and tailored to the actual needs of those representing themselves in family law courts. This requires understanding the experiences and challenges faced by family law SRLs and ensuring that SRLs participate in the design of any responses developed. Such an endeavour is consistent with a people-centred approach to access to justice in which those directly impacted by the justice system are centred in the identification and development of viable solutions. One such project was the School for Family Litigants, an access to justice initiative designed by the National Self-Represented Litigants Project to help SRLs participating in family law litigation.

Welfarism is the idea that government should always try to make individuals’ lives go better, for them, than they otherwise would, overall. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate welfarism’s compatibility with, and potential to support, the ambitions of person-centred justice. Welfarism is a normative theory applicable to public policy generally, but one which has distinct consequences in the realm of law and legal systems. They are considered just to the extent that they generate the best possible expected welfare consequences for all of the individuals who are affected by them. Welfarism is radically person-centred because it requires lawmakers to treat each individual affected by their work as a distinct locus of value, including those who have been subordinated or ignored.

The phrase “people-centred justice” is a powerful rallying idea for improving access to justice. But what does it mean? While it is attractively simple, its openness means reformers can subsume a number of very different aims under its banner. Using various examples from New Zealand, where it has featured in domestic policy since 2012, this article considers three aspects of people-centred justice that mean it is open to various interpretations: conceptions of people (as legal actors, people with needs broader than law, people connected to communities); tensions between the needs of various people; and the role of representatives of people in people-centred justice. It argues that as people-centred justice comes of age, attention needs to be paid to refining its meaning. It must remain thoughtfully anchored to its original goals and its complexities need to be recognised and attended to if it is to realise its promise as a focus for access to justice reform.