Telling the Law to the Public. Are There Better Ways?

On many occasions we’ve posted on the need to communicate effectively about the law to a general public in non-technical prose. (e.g. Èducaloi, Public Legal Ed in New Brunswick via Twitter, Legal Problems in Ontario? You’re Not Alone, Your Rights – Your Language)

Lawyers — and those who work routinely with lawyers — often don’t recognise how much the concepts and vocabulary of the law constitute an effective barrier to communication. Bentham made the point long before us.

So we’re particularly pleased to support an excellent 2 day conference next month in Montréal organised by Educaloi, Québec’s premier organisation dedicated to innovation in the field of telling the public about rights and laws, Explaining the Law to Others: Message Received… and Understood! / Dire le droit pour être compris,

Starting on October 21 and ending on the Friday afternoon it will be conducted in both official languages and legal jargon will be banished.

The 2010 annual meeting of the Public Legal Education Association of Canada will be held just before the conference. the audience will be people working in the justice sector and those whose day-to-day activities involve educating the public about the law and the workings of the justice system.

Let’s quote the organiser on the theme of the conference:

Since the raison d’être of the law is to regulate social interaction, it is clear that the general public must be able to understand it. But given its growing complexity and the sheer number of legal rules governing citizens, it is also clear that the law is not accessible to everyone.

Who must be able to understand the law? Why is it important that it be accessible? Are laws, judgments and contracts – to name but a few legal documents ‐ too complicated?

Do people involved in the justice system – lawyers, notaries, judges, legislators,governments, journalists, communications specialists, public interest groups and service providers – have a duty to explain the law in a way that is understandable?

All of these people seem to agree that it is important to clearly communicate legal information, given that a better understanding of the justice system and legal rules by the general public creates confidence in the system and promotes a positive image of the legal profession.

Despite this, the law, and especially the way it is communicated, is still largely impenetrable. In fact, due to the multitude of legal rules and growing specialization, the law is more and more difficult to understand. As a result, even legal professionals find themselves in the shoes of the layperson when they venture out of their areas of expertise.

This paradox results from a lot of factors: a misunderstanding of the benefits and the process of explaining the law in plain language, myths surrounding the risks of simplifying the law, a lack of resources or costs, etc.

This conference plans to:

• demystify the use of plain language in the field of law and explore its benefits for legal professionals and the general public alike,
• better understand its limits, and
• allow various players from the justice world to share information on innovative practises that can be a source of inspiration for others.

After all, explaining the law to others is an art. As with all art forms, it’s essential to first understand what is at stake and to invest in learning the skills that are its building blocks. Only then can it be fully mastered.

One track on the Friday morning will be solely devoted to exploring how social media can be used to communicate with a broader public and how its views might be reflected back. There’s a distinguished panel of Francophone experts and two Anglophones — from Slaw: the two Simons, Simon Fodden and Simon Chester. They’ll be joined by Guillaume Lavoie, Executive Director of Mission Leadership Quebec, affiliated with the Centre d’études et de recherches internationales at the Université de Montréal (CÉRIUM), and Maître Mélanie Joly, Managing Partner of the Montreal office of the global communications firm Cohn & Wolfe how legal professionals use social media to reach their target audiences. Maître Vincent Gautrais, Associate Professor at the Université de Montréal, and Maître Bertrand Salvas, a notary and regular contributor to l’Entracte, a publication of the Chambre des notaires du Québec will join Simon Fodden on the second panel. The first part of the social media workshop will touch on the use and importance of social media in areas other than law, for example, the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign. The second will draw lessons from work currently being done to communicate about the law using social media — including our reflections on the implications of Slaw