LSO needs to hear from us about articling reform
With the proposed changes to the articling program, I’ve been thinking about the LSO’s strategic objective to enhance access to justice in the context of the proposed changes to the articling program.
It is, I think, fairly uncontentious to say that the articling program as it is has tremendous problems: lack of actual learning in many positions, abusive practices, lack of livable wages, lack of variety in positions consistent with the variety of actual work in law, the massive obstacles facing racialized licensees, and of course, the ratio between students and positions available. But the solution to these problems is being discussed in isolation and that is a guaranteed way of fucking things up.
The real issue here is that the way we choose to move forward with articles is indicative of the sort of legal system we want to have. Do we want to maintain the mysticism surrounding our profession that leads to “oohs” and “aahs” when we tell people at parties that we’re lawyers or do we want to be accessible both as a profession and as a service? If we want the latter, and I certainly hope most people do, none of the proposed changes go to addressing the real problems with accessibility.
Instead, we’ve allowed problems like the outrageous cost of tuition, which leads exactly the sort of people we’re trying to encourage to enter the fieldo self-select out before they even start. Our school tells students that they ought to have “skin in the game”, as it were, as they dismiss calls for greater financial support, as if they could possibly know what difficult decisions, opportunity costs, and sacrifices beyond the cost of tuition a potential student is already subject to.
Not only that, but the fact that our law schools have been historically deeply inaccessible to certain communities (often overlapping with communities underserved by the profession) also means that among the sacrifices being asked of these groups is to enter what is often a hostile environment and to nevertheless succeed at the same rate as people for whom the system was literally tailored. And then we tell these students to go out and find a job in a profession infamous for abusive practices.
I’m not sure what the right way of resolving the articling crisis is. On the one hand, many students at this school have been held prisoner by my rants about the inadequacy of our legal education in preparing us for actual practice. The idea of being allowed to represent clients without ever having the safety net of a supervising lawyer for your first few months leaves me cold. I think it is no surprise that lawyers working alone make up more than half of complaints filed with the LSO in 2017, regardless of their year of call.
On the other hand, it is a system which perpetuates abusive behavior and consistently acts as an obstacle for exactly the sort of people we need more of in law.
What I do know is that we can’t think about articling in isolation, and that the LSO needs to hear from us about the sort of profession we want to enter. You have until October 26 to send in your feedback at LSODialogue.ca. Don’t sit on the sidelines. This is our future, and we ought to have our say.
