Transcript

What is a Court?: Lorne Sossin at TEDxYorkU

thank you as you've heard I have the great Good Fortune to be a dean of Osgood Hall Law School uh and in that clip my take on the tenda Via theme was we don't always know where uh this journey is going to take us but at osid we also have a motto uh and it is Latin but a trans Ates as uh through law to Justice and actually I think the question I want to share with you which I've been wrestling with since I came to Osgood as a student some 24 years ago is very much that combination uh take the idea of change of a journey of a risk-taking path that you know uh is going to lead you to places you can't predict but keep your eye on the destination that law has to lead us to Justice it's not okay to say law will take us wherever law takes us it has to end in a place that we together feel is uh is doing Justice and and that's the question uh that has uh bedeviled me these um many years uh is how to uh plot that path so for example the question that um that I'm going to talk uh talk about today is what would a court look like uh if we conceived of it not for the judges and lawyers and professionals who inhabit it and who make it work uh but what if it were designed for the people who use it for the people whose lives are affected by the justice system touched by often the most difficult moments in their life when people find themselves caught up in litigation or criminal justice or family breakdown or uh the many challenges which uh which we know uh affect people not as legal problems but just as problems in their life for which we've come up with uh this connection to courts and to a system of justice uh so how can we think of it uh differently how can we chart that path uh in a way that's going to land more firmly in what to the community what to people in their everyday lives is going to feel like something they can have ownership of and that's that idea of being the subject and not the object uh of what we take justice to mean so when I teach a course called legal process it's much more fun than it sounds uh we start on the very first day with the gaka tree which um uh is a this tree here that you're seeing is in Rwanda and it's not just a tree uh the gacha idea is to create a court uh in villages in communities and particularly at the most difficult moment in which to try to do justice and that is uh in a post genocidal context so following the massacres of 1994 the Rwanda justice system found itself with over a 100,000 prisoners people alleged to have done unspeakable things to their neighbors uh and no meaningful way to deal with all those hearings those trials it would take decades and it would really be a a a context of Justice delayed is Justice denied so instead the gacha idea was let the communities take their own back uh and let perpetrators meet victims uh and for example if if they seek an apology which is accepted uh then the sentence is reduced that is a really Innovative bold challenging idea for a justice system that a court can be under a tree and that Justice can be delivered in a way that is responsive to community well here's the idea of a court we're much more familiar with this is osot Hall down at Queen and University uh and of course a place um where the the law school that I'm a part of began about 24 years ago uh it's still the home of the court of appeal the superior court it's a place where incredibly important questions are debated whether it's same-sex marriage is prostitution legal when does Life Begin do we have the right to die with dignity we have the right to go on strike uh how are we going to manage uh situations of great social upheaval of poverty of want of mental health uh going untreated for example and rather than deal with those as problems too often in these cour houses we see lawyers who are too expensive engaged in legal arguments that are too abstract in front of robed judges who are too disconnected from community and as a result we have no ownership of the moments that happen in this building important as they are and as committed smart and passionate as the people are who inhabit that that building but a court I want to suggest to you was never intended to be a building building it was never intended to have pillars and bricks and be cut off from the rest of our lives so uh to use a healthcare example too often what we're doing is worrying about how to build ambulances to get to the bottom of the cliff which is a familiar uh metaphor in access to Justice debates we're worried about getting that ambulance to the bottom of the cliff to PE put people back together again who've been broken by their encounter with the legal system rather than focusing on building a railing at the top so people never fall over and if you think of that in a mental health context we know we've got people going untreated in prisons we know we've got situations of communities in distress without community supports without sufficient uh treatment programs and we know the criminal justice system Civil Justice System that's where people end up who are themselves the embodiment of other broken systems Health Care social supports families Etc uh if we focused on preventing that fall if we focused on healing the problems I want to suggest to you we'd have an entirely different understanding of communities and courts and this is beginning to happen in 2008 in Vancouver the late chief judge Houston ansfield presided over the opening of the very first Community Court in Canada in as I said the downtown east side and the goal here is not just to sentence people but to take those in the criminal justice system and look at the problem solving that each incident coming before the court in fact represents what community supports what treatment program what ways of integrating someone back into a situation that can position them for Success can be offered through criminal justice rather than just warehousing people who have as I said fallen over that uh cliff and this idea was in fact recommended after the 2011 uh Stanley riots you had all these people alleged to have engaged in vandalism theft assaults uh what to do with that kind of you know huge overflow of of people coming out of a very particular kind of community uh breakdown and and again the idea of a community Court can represent that ability of going outside the building outside the pillars and the bricks uh to a place where we can talk about the underlying issues that create all of the uh reason we know people uh can slip through uh those cracks in taking that idea a step further The Truth and Reconciliation Commission Canada's Innovation following the settlement of the residential schools class actions uh has led us to create a legal process that in fact not only doesn't have a court doesn't have a hearing has no evidence isn't about giving testimony leading to judgment but it's about coming together to share incredibly painful stories of children ripped from homes and communities of pain of abuse of healing of reconciliation and that notion that again travels across the country it's not located in a place it's a way of approaching a national project of reconciliation one individual painful story uh at a time but again stories that end uh with much more sense of hope and a chance to move forward together than stories that we often hear coming out of uh our cour houses so ultimately uh where does this take that Courthouse story well I want to suggest to you it takes us away from buildings and to people in relationships uh in our community uh and ways in which we can take back ownership of that Journey from law to justice as I believe it was always intended to be a shared project so oen which stands for the Ontario Justice education Network work just celebrated uh its first 10 years and it's an enormous uh innovation in bringing school children judges lawyers academics uh people involved in every aspect of our justice system together to explore you know mock trials debates about uh compelling legal issues taking these ideas out of the courtroom into the classroom taking people who will see each other just as objects and putting them in a position of understanding the shoes each other's each other might walk in uh which uh you know assume that was uh grammatically correct and you have the idea uh and ultimately uh if we do that if we put people together and see the call to action as one in which whether it's joining peacebuilders conflict resolution legal literacy getting involved in uh the issues and debates that are about solving the problems that matter most to us uh then that really will be living not just the way that must be tried but also through law to Justice uh and I hope to share that journey and I hope to continue struggling with that question uh and I hope uh that that is a a way of understanding the places and the people uh that might be a little different than you started with just is as it is different than I started with uh when I arrived um uh here uh and it feels like yesterday uh but uh but as I said I'm I'm looking forward to it being a shared journey in the future it's been a wonderful afternoon uh for me I'm learning a huge amount here uh and look forward to the rest of the uh the shareed afternoon together thank you very [Applause] much