First, let me introduce Craigslist: it’s a twelve-year-old collection of city-based websites featuring free classified ads and discussion forums. It is one of the top fifty most viewed websites in the world, the 16th most popular in Canada, and in the top ten in the U.S.
Among Craigslist’s roughly 100 forums is the Legal Forum. Viewing the Legal Forum by city—say Edmonton, for example—gives you a window on (A) the legal needs of Craigslist users in a particular area and (B) just how frightening the public’s understanding of basic, practical law can be. Complicating everything, of course, is that many of those who answer legal questions on the Forum are both quite confident of their answer and astoundingly, harmfully wrong. Even so, there are probably as many truly helpful responses in the forum as their are harmful ones.
Another notable site is the eleven-year-old LawGuru. Rather than letting anyone in the world anonymously answer legal questions, LawGuru limits the answering to its “attorney network of over 5,000 attorneys in 35 countries.” Anyone can ask a question for free, and each answer has the name and contact information of the lawyer who wrote it. LawGuru gets considerable traffic from Canada, and like the Craigslist Legal Forum, it offers an insight into the general legal needs of people with web access.
The obvious question is how PLE organizations might learn from or interact with these sites. For one thing, are Craigslist’s Legal Forum and LawGuru two of the main places web users go to solve their legal problems? And if so, should PLE organizations inject themselves somehow into those sites? Or should they collaborate with those sites? Replicate them? Ignore them? Neither of these sites has ever come up in my discussions with PLE providers throughout the country—are they not on anybody’s radar?
April 16, 2007 at 11:08 am
Given your observation of “just how frightening the public’s understanding of basic, practical law can be” and CJ McLachlin’s observations in her recent speech about the need for a proper civics curriculum and Charter education, are other jurisdictions getting editorials or other press coverage of the idea of such a curriculum? The Edmonton Journal picked up this idea in its Saturday editorial.
The idea for such a curriculum fits with Sarah’s LRE questions a few weeks ago.
Kim
April 16, 2007 at 11:09 am
The Edmonton Journal came out in support of a proper civics curriculum of whish the Charter should be a part.
Kim
April 16, 2007 at 11:34 am
Thank you for the comments, Kim.
For those reading along, here are links to the April 14 Edmonton Journal editorial and a Globe and Mail article on Chief Justice McLachlin’s call for teaching the Charter in school:
http://www.canada.com/edmontonjournal/news/opinion/story.html?id=5dee1e86-2724-4e8b-8000-f0aeec778084
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20070413.CHARTER13/TPStory/National
April 16, 2007 at 5:22 pm
Thanks for the links to these articles. Leadership from the top is needed! The Chief Justice’s comments are supported by an Ipso Reid poll commissioned by the Office of Children and Youth in BC in the fall of 2006 – the November 2006 poll results lead to the recommendation that human rights should be a mandatory part of school curricula. Until that happens, awareness/education levels of human rights will remain astonishly low.
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