This website’s purpose is to fill what we considered a lacuna in the public discourse – accessible, well-informed commentary on important legal issues that face Canadians. With that in mind, we decided to set up a forum for legal professors, soon to be professors, practitioners and precocious students to provide insight into topical legal issues, in order to improve the understanding of interested members of the public who might not have the time or resources to do the research themselves. We aim to provide a forum for those of us in the legal community who like to complain about the media providing an incomplete or misleading picture of legal issues to actually do something to complete or improve the picture.
There has been greater interest in the identity of the administrators of this site than we had anticipated. At the outset, we did not consider linking ourselves to the site explicitly, simply because it was established on a whim by a few no-name law students/Twitter acquaintances. There are no formal titles nor is there any organized division of labour. Membership is fluid, and there are many people who are chipping in here and there, with whatever time they can spare. Given the grassroots nature of the enterprise, and the possibility if not likelihood that various administrators may not be involved in the project into the future, we did not see a purpose in publishing our names. We will not be posting any articles anonymously, and trust that the quality of the contributors and their contributions will speak for themselves – for better or worse. However, human curiosity being what it is, if you would like to know who clicks on the “publish” button, feel free to email us and one of us will happy to introduce ourselves.
Our aim is simply to solicit competent legal observers who are willing to donate their time to providing the public with accessible legal commentary on issues of interest, and to field submissions to determine whether they fit in with the site’s mandate. We are endeavouring to do that, to the extent our other responsibilities and obligations permit. However, we would very much like to add a few more administrators in the future – both to supplement the current “workforce” and to take over as current administrators are forced to move on. We hope to draw from the ranks of law schools across the country students with the passion and interest to help make this project a success. Any students who would like to be administrators, please contact us and throw your hat into the ring.
At the end of the day, this is an experiment, and we don’t know if it will work out. But any success we have will depend entirely on the willingness of those who make a living doing law to provide accessible information to the public who are often affected by it.
Please send any questions, concerns, suggestions or criticisms to canadianlegalease [at] gmail [dot] com.
