Then we have poorly trained immigration consultants. These are basically paralegals who do the work of lawyers. There are roughly 12,000 consultants and 600 immigration lawyers. I speak with folks almost every week who are victims of scams by immigration consultants. They pay $60k for a work permit.

I recently assisted a wonderful family who hired a consultant to handle a A34 allegation. This is a complex matter and the consultant was completely incompetent. We did our best to reverse the Deportation Order but the damage was done at the hearing stage. They were basically SRLs, except they were not. They made the decision not to hire a lawyer and it burned them.

Much more on this, in Hedgewitch Part 3: LLMs Should Challenge, Not Obey, at
https://leaflessca.wordpress.com/2026/06/07/hedgewitch-part-3-llms-should-challenge-not-obey/

This is particularly true for SRLs who are victims of IPV and family violence facing litigation abuse, where perpetrators continue their coercive control through the misuse of legal processes and the manipulation of legal actors as bureaucratic proxies.

What continues to astonish me is that the judiciary often appears to expect SRLs to produce pleadings, evidence, legal arguments, and procedural compliance at a level approaching that of trained lawyers. That expectation raises an obvious question: what practical value are law school, articling, mentorship, and years of professional experience supposed to provide if survivors are expected to perform similarly without any of them?

The expectation is especially absurd when imposed on people navigating trauma, financial depletion, and ongoing litigation abuse. It creates a Kafkaesque situation in which individuals are denied meaningful access to counsel, denied meaningful and legally required accommodations for the realities and resulting medical conditions they are facing, and then judged against standards developed for legal professionals—a comparison that, in almost any other context, would be recognized as both ridiculous and unjust.

The result is not access to justice. It is access to procedure, with justice remaining out of reach for many of the very people the justice system exists to protect.

If courts, legal actors, and justice institutions continue to treat meaningful access to justice as secondary to procedural compliance, they should not be surprised when public confidence in the administration of justice continues to erode. A justice system derives its legitimacy not from the complexity of its procedures, but from its ability to deliver justice fairly, meaningfully, and accessibly.

It is time for the machinery of justice to confront the inherent longstanding disconnect between the principles it espouses and the realities experienced by those seeking its protection. Public trust, democratic legitimacy, and the rule of law ultimately depend upon that alignment.

Many nonprofits operate on budgets under $20,000, with no staff, informal governance, and no capacity for audits. The founder often performs every operational role—administration, bookkeeping, fundraising, program delivery, even using their home as the office—sometimes contributing personal funds as well. When new directors later take over, they may allege mismanagement, despite the absence of resources for proper audits or professional support.

The organization clearly receives a benefit; the volunteer‑director experiences a corresponding deprivation; and often there is no clear juristic reason for the nonprofit to retain the benefit without compensation.

Yet this scenario is rarely discussed in the literature. It would be valuable to see future scholarship address whether nonprofits can be enriched unjustly by the very people who built and sustained them. /end/

Does this episode also point to the speed that can be achieved if both parties are willing to accelerate to get a decision?

The Lundy Model provides a practical framework for improving participation in justice processes, especially where decisions can deeply affect a child’s life and well-being. The idea of giving feedback to children about how their views influenced the outcome is also powerful, because it helps make the process feel more respectful, transparent, and child-centred.

Thank you for highlighting this important approach to meaningful participation in the justice system

What an excellent piece – well done! You can note that as of last year we now have in Ottawa what is described as the “rocket docket” which means you get a trial date a year out from one’s first court appearance. That was implemented without any consultation with the Bar and by people who have NO systems design training.

Not the first nor will it be the last.

Another legal historian has referred to Professor Mossman’s earlier book, The First Women Lawyers, as being a ‘magisterial’ work… and I see you have called this one a masterpiece. That’s good enough for me!

And, as you’ve probably heard, it’s insanely hard to say exactly what you want: instead you get “bugs”, and have to test extensively to just keep the number small. Those you debug

With an LLM, you’re trying to write a “prompt”, in an ambiguous human language to compile into a formal argument.

I wouldn’t use LLMs that way unless you have a way to write tests for the correctness of the outputs, and a debugger to fix errors when you find them.

I fear you’ll have to use a formal logic language to write prompts. An example of this, for some some math I did is:

Lower Hull

Given: A finite set of points P = {p₁, p₂, …, pₙ} in 2D space

Output: An ordered sequence of points L = [l₁, l₂, …, lₖ] representing the lower hull

Postconditions (what must be true after execution):

Subset property: L ⊆ P (all points in the lower hull are from the original set)

Ordering property: l₁ has the minimum x-coordinate (leftmost), and lₖ has the maximum x-coordinate (rightmost). For all i 0

Minimality property: L is minimal — no point from P can be removed from L while still maintaining properties 2 and 3. (This ensures you have the actual hull, not just some counterclockwise path)

Completeness property: All points on the lower convex hull boundary are included. Formally: for any point p ∈ P that lies on the lower boundary of the convex hull, p ∈ L

Preconditions (assumptions):

P contains at least 2 points
Points are distinct (no duplicates)
The meaning of lower hull is understood by all

I’m not sure I could write that kind of logic in order to create a court submission (:-)) And I still don’t have a tester or debugger for it.