This is the second in a series of histories of major public legal education organizations in Canada. The first looked at the People’s Law School; today, I cover the other sole-purpose PLE organization in BC, the Law Courts Education Society.
The Law Courts Education Society (LCES) has been a sole-purpose public legal education (PLE) provider since 1989, and before that had been a dedicated PLE program of the Courts of British Columbia since 1979. Today, LCES maintains an enormous palette of programs and projects, centered around court visits, classes, and workshops for students and the community. The Society’s work also includes in-school programs, publications and videos, collaboration on a drop-in self-help centre for self-represented litigants, and both Canada-wide and international projects.
Street view of the LCES classroom in the downtown Vancouver Provincial Courts building (click to enlarge)
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In 1979, upon the completion of a new courts complex in Vancouver, the British Columbia courts agreed to collaborate with the BC Ministry of the Attorney General (MAG) on a three-year experimental program to use the law courts to build public understanding of law in the province. The three-year project, enjoying the financial and administrative support of the Court Services Branch of the MAG and the advisory assistance of the BC judiciary, grew quickly to become a successful program. Indeed, the program’s success carried it long past the initial three-year pilot period, and by 1989 it had brought over 150,000 people into the BC courts to learn about the Canadian justice system. Major projects during this time included PLE programming for upper- and intermediate-level school students, mock trials, and special publications and events for non-English-speaking and multicultural communities.
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