Subseries 3 - Legal Aid

0.6 m of textual records

In May of 1964, I was approached by the recently established Joint Committee on Legal Aid (made up of representatives from the Law Society and the Government) to see whether I would assist them with their research (file 2). My work on bail, which was to be published the following year, dealt with representation of accused persons at trials (see Detention Before Trial Subseries). With the help of two summer research assistants, I produced a document for the Joint Committee entitled “Legal Aid: Working Papers Prepared for the Joint Committee on Legal Aid”, which was submitted in September 1964 (file 3). The Joint Committee’s Report was published in March 1965 (files 5 and 6). I gave a number of talks and a CBC Viewpoint on the topic (files 8 and 9). The Joint Committee did not want my document published, but agreed to allow copies to be sent to major law libraries. For all subsequent projects I carefully negotiated the right to publish in advance.

Over 30 years later, in December 1996, the Government set up a Legal Aid Review Committee under John McCamus and he invited me to do work on the issue of governance of legal aid schemes (files 11-13). My work on other areas of governance, including governance of judicial matters, gave me some interest and expertise in the area. With the assistance of three excellent summer research assistants (Rob Brush, borrowed for several weeks from Lerner and Associates, and two students who had just finished first year, Graham Rawlinson, and Katrina Wyman), I submitted a study to the Committee at the end of June 1997. The study, Governance of Legal Aid Schemes, was to a considerable extent reflected in the Committee’s report (file 43). It was published in volume three of their report (file 44). The files contain some of the key documents I worked with (files 14-24), the many drafts that the document went through (files 28-29, 32-41), the various comments on those drafts (files 33-35, 39), and meetings with other researchers and the Committee (files 27 and 31). There are very few hand-written drafts. This was the first major project that was composed almost entirely on the computer.

In February, 1998 the Law Society announced that it would be giving up the administration of the plan to an independent body--the key recommendation of my study and the McCamus Report.

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