In Memoriam: Lisa Moore — Committed to Putting the Public First

It is with deep sorrow that we mark the unexpected passing of our friend and colleague at the Canadian Forum on Civil Justice (CFCJ), Lisa Moore, who passed away in December. Lisa was a generous colleague, an incisive researcher, and a quiet but formidable force in the access to justice community. Lisa devoted her professional and academic life to understanding how people actually experience legal problems, and to insisting that access to justice research remain accountable to those lived realities. Her passing leaves a profound absence in a field she helped shape with care, rigour, and compassion.

What distinguished Lisa’s work was not simply its methodological sophistication, but her conviction that even evidence-based research on access to justice research must begin with people and must ultimately serve the public rather than abstract systems or professional interests.

That commitment is evident in the many CFCJ research programs Lisa led and helped to shape, including our flagship project Everyday Legal Problems and Cost of Justice in Canada. The projects Lisa contributed to fundamentally altered how civil and family justice issues are understood in Canada by documenting the prevalence, clustering, costs, and consequences of legal problems as they unfold in people’s lives. Lisa’s work illuminated how legal problems are intertwined with financial precarity, health challenges, housing insecurity, and social exclusion. The insights gleaned from her work continue to influence scholarship, policy discussions, and the design of people centered justice services.

Lisa consistently pushed the field beyond siloed thinking. Building on the CFCJ’s long history of work in the area of people-centred research, she was a strong advocate for multidisciplinary approaches to legal problem resolution, and exploring how legal assistance intersects with social, health, and community supports. Her research with the CFCJ regularly challenged conventional assumptions about what “legal solutions” look like and helped normalize more holistic, community-based responses to justice problems.

She also made significant contributions to work relevant to Canada’s commitments to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) including initiatives linked SDG 16.3, which aims to promote equal access to justice and the rule of law. Her contributions reflected her belief that access to justice work should be both local and global.

Alongside her professional work, Lisa was deeply committed to her own scholarly development. While leading major access to justice initiatives, she earned a Master of Science in Legal Studies from Cornell University, and at the time of her passing was completing her PhD at the University of Toronto in Criminology and Sociolegal Studies. Her academic work reflected the same questions that animated her professional life: how people understand and respond to legal problems, how systems succeed or fail them, and how research can meaningfully inform innovation and reform.

Those who worked with Lisa will remember not only her intellectual contributions, but her generosity as a collaborator and mentor. She asked careful questions, listened closely, and had a rare ability to bridge disciplines and perspectives without losing sight of the human stakes involved. In the days since learning of her passing, students she supervised have spoken of her kindness, patience, and genuine investment in their growth, recalling how she took time to mentor them, encouraged their ideas, and created opportunities for them to learn, contribute, and develop. Peers and fellow researchers have echoed these reflections. CFCJ Senior Research Fellow Ab Currie, among others, has described Lisa as supportive and patient, noting that her advice was consistently sought out and always generously given. And, as Noel Semple, Associate Professor at University of Windsor Faculty of Law noted when learning of her passing, “Lisa made enduring contributions to the access to justice literature, and her colleagues recognize that she would have contributed much more.”

Lisa’s legacy is one of people-centred justice in its truest sense. She reminded us that access to justice is not an abstract principle, but a lived experience shaped by vulnerability, resilience, and the search for fairness in ordinary life. Honouring Lisa’s memory means continuing to ask the questions she insisted upon and continuing to place people at the heart of justice research and reform.

We invite all of those in the access to justice community to rediscover, or to encounter for the first time, a selection of Lisa’s recent work:

Currie, A., Farrow, T. C. W., & Moore, L. (2025, October 3). Using representation pathways to explore court data. Slaw. https://www.slaw.ca/2025/10/03/using-representation-pathways-to-explore-court-data/

Moore, L. (2025, June 20). People-centered justice and the civil–criminal divide. Slaw. https://www.slaw.ca/2025/06/20/people-centered-justice-and-the-civil-criminal-divide/

Moore, L. (2024, June 12). The case for multi-disciplinary models. Slaw. https://www.slaw.ca/2024/06/12/the-case-for-multi-disciplinary-models/

Moore, L. (2023, March). Community justice services: Models from around the world. Canadian Forum on Civil Justice. https://cfcj-fcjc.org/wp-content/uploads/Community-Justice-Services-Models-from-Around-the-World-Lisa-Moore.pdf

Moore, L. (2023). Overcoming geographic barriers: Towards a framework for facilitating legal service delivery in rural communities in Canada. In Access to justice in rural communities: Global perspectives. Hart Publishing. (https://www.bloomsbury.com/ca/access-to-justice-in-rural-communities-9781509951659/)

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Authors: Nicole Aylwin & Trevor Farrow on behalf of the CFCJ.