Policy Making

So why should we care about Legal Theory?

So why should we care about Legal Theory… When I was in law school in the early 1970s we were required to take a ‘paper course’. Since most courses were based on exams and usually final exams that counted for the entire course mark, we had only a few optional courses for meeting this requirement. […]

But first a word about Justice

Justice seems to come in a range of flavours: formal justice, procedural justice, restorative justice, retributive justice, transitional justice, and social justice, to name a few. (I’m actually starting a list. When it looks useful, I’ll post it.) This suggests that there is some underlying concept of justice itself that is generic to all those […]

What’s Wrong with Legal Positivism?

Simply put, legal positivism is a theory of law that holds that law and morality are entirely separate domains. HLA Hart, a pre-eminent legal positivist, argues that a modern, positivist legal system is characterized by the presence of both primary and secondary rules and by the existence of a legal elite that alone can know […]

Welcome to Theorizing PLE

There is nothing so practical as good theory – Kurt Lewin Public legal education began in Canada during the late 1960s at a time when the roles and performance of many of our social institutions were being questioned. Initially the very idea of public legal education was considered radical – a little knowledge is a […]