Beginning in January 2014, APB's Executive Director Jamie Maclaren will lead a new UBC Law seminar tentatively entitled, "Access to Justice and the Modern Individual Litigant".

The seminar will investigate the deepening crisis in access to justice for low- and middle-income Canadians, with particular focus on how individuals approach and navigate civil justice systems in pursuit of timely and fair resolutions to legal problems.

Guest lecturers, experts and students will explore the philosophical foundations of the common law, trace the evolution of the concept of equal access to justice, and discuss different sociological analyses of how Canadian civil justice systems serve individuals across a range of social categories. The seminar will also review the history of public legal services in Canada, and analyze past and present justice reform efforts undertaken by the legal profession, the judiciary, governments and other justice system stakeholders.

Students will be asked to think critically and creatively as they engage the problem of limited and unequal access to justice from an individual user perspective. The seminar will involve a small experiential learning component in which students select and visit a site of “street-level” legal service provision, and then reflect on the experience. A major goal of the seminar is to encourage UBC Law students to develop new and varied responses to the problem of unequal access to justice in Canada, and to add their own ideas to the body of knowledge passed on to future law students