Twenty-Five Years of Dynamic Tension: The Parkdale Community Legal Services Experience

Parkdale Community Legal Services has been the site of initiatives, challenges, and historic accomplishments in the areas of community-based poverty law, community organizing and law reform, and clinical legal education. In this article, the author takes the occasion of the clinic\u27s twenty-fifth anniversary to consider some of the events and issues that shaped Parkdale\u27s history. Drawing on a range of sources, including evaluations and reports, student writing, and scholarly publications, the author examines the issues and debates that PCLS has sparked at Osgoode Hall Law School, and some of the ground it has broken more generally in its work. The history of Parkdale Community Legal Services is analyzed in relation to four areas: a) the place of clinical education in a law school; b) the place of legal education in a community legal clinic; c) the reconceptualization of clinical legal education in a poverty-law-clinic context; and d) the contribution of Pas to poverty law theory, practice, and law reform

Twenty-Five Years of Dynamic Tension: The Parkdale Community Legal Services Experience

Parkdale Community Legal Services has been the site of initiatives, challenges, and historic accomplishments in the areas of community-based poverty law, community organizing and law reform, and clinical legal education. In this article, the author takes the occasion of the clinic\u27s twenty-fifth anniversary to consider some of the events and issues that shaped Parkdale\u27s history. Drawing on a range of sources, including evaluations and reports, student writing, and scholarly publications, the author examines the issues and debates that PCLS has sparked at Osgoode Hall Law School, and some of the ground it has broken more generally in its work. The history of Parkdale Community Legal Services is analyzed in relation to four areas: a) the place of clinical education in a law school; b) the place of legal education in a community legal clinic; c) the reconceptualization of clinical legal education in a poverty-law-clinic context; and d) the contribution of Pas to poverty law theory, practice, and law reform

Prisoner Never Gave Me Anything For What He Had Done: Aboriginal Voices in the Criminal Court

Aboriginal people participated in different ways in the criminal process in the early years of the North-West Territories region of Canada: including, as accused persons, as Informants, and as witnesses. Their physical participation was often mediated by the police, Indian agents and sometimes their Chiefs. Their words were also mediated by interpreters, both linguistic and cultural, and their signatures invariably marked as “X” on their depositions. Scholarship that has examined the relationship of Aboriginal peoples to the criminal law has tended to interrogate the criminalization and moral regulation strategies implicit in the process of colonization and domination of the First Peoples. This paper will discuss less visible aspects of the legalized processes of colonization: (1) the participation of Plains Cree, Saulteaux and Métis peoples, among others, whose traditional values and norms nonetheless seep through the handwritten, translated transcription and alien norms of the Canadian criminal court; and, (2) cases in which Aboriginal complainants who, notwithstanding their substantive inequality, invoked the criminal process to insist that those who wronged them also be punished in accordance with the principles of Canadian law