Social Distancing Report

Hello to all of you. Just a note to let you know that I foresee a pause of a few weeks in work on the blog. We're social distancing in the Canadian countryside in a remote location where the internet is good for email but not good enough to work on the blog. But, it is a good time to think about what's next for JTL and to ramp up for the next phase. July will be one year since we first started serious work on the blog. It seems a good time to think about the

JTL Subscription Drive

Over the next few weeks we're encouraging everyone to help us build our readership. Here are two things you could do to help. Please Help To Get The Message Out It would be a big help if everyone who sees this post could post to their own networks - Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, whatever - the following text (or something like it: "Justice Through All" is an emerging community of practice for anyone interested in developing justice systems. Their goal is to help practitioners develop knowledge and skills to improve the work: justicethroughlaw.org, @JTL_blog and on Facebook. What's On Your Mind? Our best

A Tool for Excellence in Courts

If you have worked on courts, you will know how hard it can be to get a complete map of what needs to be addressed. A friend reminds us of the value of one comprehensive framework - The International Framework for Court Excellence. Originally delivered in 2006 by a consortium, it has continued to guide the work of the consortium's members and others. It is intended to apply to courts of all description - large and small, urban and rural. Check out the consortium's current membership. If you're looking for a good place to start putting the pieces together,

Legal Empowerment in the fight for Housing Justice

Once upon a time, many people thought that legal aid was the dream tool for justice seekers. Lawyers would promote access to justice, win in court and where they couldn't they would lead the fight for legal change. Broad-based legal aid programmes could support this effort. Stephen Golub invited us to think again in his ground-breaking article "Beyond Rule of Law Orthodoxy: The Legal Empowerment Alternative". He emphasized the need to help to empower communities to lead their own fights against injustice. Lawyers can help to shape legal tools that support communities in a more focused

The Access to Justice Deficit: Legal Empowerment Can Break the Shackles

5 billion people around the world lack basic access to justice. Writing in Ensia, Alessandra Bergamin describes our vast global access to justice deficit (see the Task Force on Justice) and points us to some of the organizations working on legal empowerment. If you're a project planner/designer looking at legal empowerment, you'll be happy to learn more about the work of these organizations: Namati (working through community paralegals in 6 countries)Microjustice4All (Peru)EarthRights International (a global environmental organization that seeks to put law in the hands of the people affected most by the problem)Natural Justice (environmental law and human

A New Voice for Legal Technology

At JTL we're always on the lookout for new developments in legal technology. Legal Rebels is an American Bar Association podcast for innovators who are remaking the legal profession. This month they pod about the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's new MIT Computational Law Report which describes itself as "...an agile, new media online publication that explores the ways that law and legal processes can be reimagined and engineered as computational systems'. Some of us are old enough to be unsure what that means. And what does MIT have to do with law anyway? Join us in checking out