It has been more than a decade since the publication of three major reports on access to justice in Canada. These reports, namely Access to Civil and Family Justice: A Roadmap for Change1 by the Action Committee on Access to Justice in Civil and Family Matters, Reaching Equal Justice: An Invitation to Envision and Act2 by the Canadian Bar Association, and the final report of the National Self-Represented Litigants Project,3 spurred considerable discussion, research, and action to understand and improve the state of access to justice in Canada. Importantly, all called for some variation on making the justice system “user-centered,”4 “people-centered,”5 or “user-friendly.”6

This paper reflects on the recent, rapid rise in the use of “people-centered justice” language in global policy and international cooperation contexts. People-centered justice has provided a valuable common language to achieve policy buy-in and structure discussions on achieving justice for all, and breakfree from path dependencies of earlier rule of law assistance, and donor support long dominated by top-down support to courts and formal institutions of the justice system. However, recent uses of people-centered justice—without additional clarity—gloss over crucial differences in how justice challenges are framed, which could risk undermining some of its initial progress, or repeating past challenges encountered with rule of law support. Experiences of the OECD, USAID and in the United Nations systems provide contrasting examples of charting new paths, or clinging to well-worn path dependencies. We conclude with several reflections to overcome concerns with current uses.

Les discussions autour de l’accès à la justice réfèrent de plus en plus souvent au concept de justice centrée sur la personne, sans toutefois le définir clairement. Le présent article en propose une définition plus précise au moyen d’une analyse thématique réflexive de la littérature. Ce faisant, il identifie un défi majeur qui se pose lorsque le concept est appliqué au règlement des différends : bien que la justice centrée sur la personne poursuive des objectifs louables, les conceptions actuellement mises de l’avant ne tiennent pas compte du rôle que joue le règlement des différends dans le développement du droit. L’article soutient que toute réforme centrée sur la personne doit maintenir l’équilibre entre cette fonction publique du règlement des différends et les besoins des particuliers. La tension entre ces préoccupations concurrentes ouvre la voie à des arrangements institutionnels alternatifs qui pourraient fournir un service public de règlement des différends tout en répondant mieux aux besoins privés. Pour illustrer cette possibilité, la dernière partie de l’article présente les tribunaux non professionnels – des institutions locales menées par des juges sans formation ni expérience en droit – comme une option potentielle de réforme centrée sur la personne.

Recognizing the justice data deficit across Canada, we undertook a multi-faceted project to better understand access to justice (A2J) issues and legal needs of individuals and communities in Saskatchewan. This paper describes the 2021-2022 Saskatchewan Legal Needs Survey, a multiple perspective service provider legal-needs survey intended to complement user-centred surveys and designed to capture the experiences of justice system users via perceptions of service providers. Comprised of two online self-report questionnaires (Community Agency Survey and Lawyer Survey), data were collected from a provincially representative sample of community agencies (n = 67) and lawyers (n = 272). Results generally highlight respondents’ perceptions of A2J issues and priority legal needs based on their experiences with the communities and clients they serve. Overall, a multiple perspective service provider approach affords greater insight into justice system gaps and serves as a viable model for future person-centered justice data collection projects, nationally and internationally.

This article investigates the conflict resolution strategies used by individuals facing legal problems in British Columbia through the lens of a people-centered approach to justice. Utilizing qualitative interviews, the research examines how people navigate civil, administrative, and family law issues, focusing on the pathways chosen and the factors influencing their decisions. The findings reveal significant barriers to accessing justice, including the complexity of legal information, the psychological impact of unresolved issues, and the varying levels of legal support. By capturing personal experiences, this research offers insights into the effectiveness of current legal assistance models and underscores the need for more accessible and supportive justice systems. The study contributes to the broader discourse on access to justice, highlighting the importance of understanding legal problem-solving behaviors from the perspective of those directly affected.

Many leading access to justice organizations recognize the importance of including the public’s perspective within programming and policy development. One key question underlying this approach is, how can organizations learn about the public’s experience with legal problems and the law? Noting that conversations about legal problems provide evidence of such experiences, this paper presents a study that examines conversations posted to the social media platform Reddit. It argues that social media can be leveraged to better understand the public’s experience with legal problems and the law and, in doing so, help to inform a person-centred perspective of justice.

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.

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.