Seeing Like a Clinic

Authors

Adrian A. Smith, Osgoode Hall Law School of York University

Document Type

Article

Abstract

The prevailing commitment in clinical law programs like the Intensive Program in Poverty Law at Osgoode Hall Law School is to an engaged-contextualism, which serves to see law in action. It has provided participating students with some insight into the everyday life of ordinary people, approaching—but not necessarily fully perceptive to—certain socio-legal perspectives. But what does clinical legal education vision and envision? How precisely do clinics see? And from what source or place is that visual authority derived? Here, by attending to the prevailing “pedagogy of seeing” in contemporary poverty law clinical practice, I engage with teaching, learning, and praxis in clinical legal knowledge production. I contend that engaged-contextualism troublingly adheres to a pedagogy of seeing that is indebted to the very authority it should strive to dismantle: state power. With a view to the capitalist state as a nationally-inscribed territorial ordering authority, evidenced through settler and imperialist articulations, I undertake a speculative re-envisioning of knowledge production in and about poverty law. The aim is to encourage an alternative pedagogy motivated by an emancipatory praxis. It is a praxis not of saving poverty law but of constant struggle against sovereign state authority rooted in the creative capacities and self-organizing activities—and ultimately the “freedom dreams”—of poor and otherwise oppressed communities; or in a phrase, the reflexive self-authorization of social movement. The perceptible challenge of all legal education, clinical or otherwise, is ultimately not to see like the settler and imperialist, capitalist state but to look through or beyond it—through the persistent and reckless reproduction of poverty and marginalization as a basis of social order.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Citation Information

Smith, Adrian A.. "Seeing Like a Clinic." Osgoode Hall Law Journal 59.1 (2022) : 37-76.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.60082/2817-5069.3737
https://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/ohlj/vol59/iss1/3

References

1. Hannah Frank, Frame by Frame: A Materialist Aesthetics of Animated Cartoons (University of California Press, 2019) at 156. I came across Frank's text in the context of research in a different context-that of a materialist aesthetics of international law. While the framing initially drew me in, the painstaking and wonderfully inventive method of the investigation proved intriguing, and tragically so given Frank's premature death. At the risk of taking Frank's framing out of context, I provide it here as an indication of its lasting impression on my thinking, perhaps well beyond the particular context in which Frank intended. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520972773

2. In 1983, the influential Arthurs Report noted that "clinical legal education has not yet become a significant element in Canadian law schools." Consultative Group on Research and Education in Law, Law and Learning: Report to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Minister of Supply and Services, 1983) at 51 [Arthurs Report]. Since that time, clinical programs not only proliferated but also served as a precursor to the experiential turn within legal education. The history of clinical legal education in Canada is documented in numerous sources. See e.g. Sarah Buhler, Sarah Marsden & Gemma Smyth, Clinical Law: Practice, Theory, and Social Justice Advocacy (Emond Montgomery, 2016); James C Hathaway, "Clinical Legal Education" (1987) 25 Osgoode Hall LJ 239. For recent accounts, see Deborah J Cantrell, "Are Clinics a Magic Bullet" (2014) 51 Alta L Rev 831 (addressing demands for "practice ready" law graduates which are imposed on legal education generally and clinical education specifically); Lorne Sossin, "Experience the Future of Legal Education" (2014) 51 Alta L Rev 849; Harry W Arthurs, "Law and Learning in an Era of Globalization" (2009) 10 German LJ 629.

3. Buhler, Marsden & Smyth, supra note 2 at 2-3.

4. I have borrowed the term from Janet Zandy, a stalwart professor of working-class studies in the United States. See "Photography and Writing: A Pedagogy of Seeing" (2008) 41 Exposure: J Society for Photographic Education 26. Just as Zandy invites readers to think "deeply...about how photographs work in the world and about the worlds inside photographs," this piece issues a similar invitation for thinkers of clinical legal education (ibid at 26). See also John Berger, Ways of Seeing (Penguin Group, 1972).

5. Others have stressed "the visualization of law as an object of contemplation" in socio-legal history, legal philosophy, criminal law, legal geography, as well as at the intersection of law and "race" in the highly specialized inquiry of legal semiotics and in other ways. See e.g. Christopher Tomlins, "After Critical Legal History: Scope, Scale, Structure" (2012) 8 Annual Rev L Social Science 31 at 32; Richard K Sherwin, Visualizing Law in the Age of the Digital Baroque: Arabesques and Entanglements (Routledge, 2011); Rodney GS Carter, "'Ocular Proof': Photographs as Legal Evidence" (2010) 69 Archivaria 23; Irus Braverman, "Hidden in Plain View: Legal Geography From A Visual Perspective" (2011) 7 L Culture & Humanities 173; Osagie K Obasogie, "Do Blind People See Race? Social, Legal, and Theoretical Considerations" (2010) 44 Law & Soc'y Rev 585; Peter Goodrich, "Specters of Law: Why the History of the Legal Spectacle Has Not Been Written" (2011) 1 UC Irvine L Rev 773; Neal Feigenson, "The Visual in Law: Some Problems for Legal Theory" (2011) 10 L Culture & Humanities 1.

6. The Intensive Program in Poverty Law places twenty students during each of the fall and winter semesters at PCLS. The Program is a full-time, full-term commitment that promises to provide an enriching and challenging experience. Students are assigned to one of four divisions: Housing Rights; Workers' Rights; Social Assistance, Violence, and Health (SAVAH); or Immigration. As the front-line faces of the clinic, students conduct initial intake and have hands-on responsibility for developing cases and legal arguments, carrying a steady caseload of active files. Student caseworkers work under the tutelage of supervisory staff, including a lawyer for each divisional grouping, and community legal workers (or rights advisers), and administrative support workers, to provide legal information, advice, and representation to workers, newcomers, tenants, and social assistance claimants and recipients.

7. PCLS pursues a three-fold mandate: to provide legal services to low-income individuals; to build social movements to reduce poverty and fight for equality; and to train law students in "social justice" or "community" lawyering and poverty law-integrating strategies designed to redress individual legal problems with those designed to facilitate broader systemic change. There are wide-ranging perspectives on the efficacy of the mandate, and especially on how well law students are integrated into systemic advocacy work. My aim here is not to downplay these contrasting perspectives but instead to encourage an alternative normative account that contests the very basis of the individual work-systemic work distinction, how it is drawn, and what work is done in its name. Ultimately, mine is an account rooted in support of the collective self-activity of ordinary people in emancipatory social movements, contesting and clearing obstacles imposed to that activity. To qualify as anti-poverty work it necessarily must have a "systemic" character, understood as that which does not permit the structuring of the systemic outside of the individual nor the individual outside of the systemic.

8. A roster of Osgoode Hall faculty colleagues--currently Amar Bhatia, Fay Faraday, Janet Mosher, and Sean Rehaag-rotate as Academic Director on a two or three-year mandate(though the first two are expected to serve their first terms in the coming years). It is worth noting that, while the article relies on personal observation coupled with the insightsof some current and past roster members who have written about the program, it is not meant to suggest the adoption of a universally singular approach by directors. For some discussion of program tensions over time, see Shelley AM Gavigan, "Twenty-Five Years of Dynamic Tension: The Parkdale Community Legal Services Experience" (1997) 35 Osgoode Hall LJ 443. https://doi.org/10.60082/2817-5069.1575

9. This is the language employed by some academic roster colleagues.

10. See Alyshah Hasham, "This Parkdale legal clinic has helped tenants fight landlords for nearly 50 years. Now it's the one being evicted," Toronto Star (7 December 2018), online: https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/this-parkdale-legal-clinic-has-helped-tenants-fight-landlords-for-nearly-50-years-now-it/article_50e1a9d6-f612-5331-8c97-c3904c3d6545.html.

11. The funding cuts were ushered in during 2019. Faced with these cuts, the PCLS Board of Directors--which currently includes the Academic Director as a voting member--took the difficult decision of carrying out staff worker reductions. Contrast this with statements made in July by Attorney General Doug Downey, who called the cuts an opportunity to "make legal aid sustainable." In reference to PCLS, Downey asserted the following: "Parkdale has received funding at a higher level than other areas of the province with significant, and in some cases greater, low-income populations. Even with the changes to Parkdale's funding, it is still one of the highest funded clinics in the GTA per low-income resident....While some lawyers and special-interest groups may be critical of the renewed era of accountability at Legal Aid Ontario, it is necessary." See "Job cuts coming to local legal clinic," City News (12 July 2019) at 00h:01m:49s, online (video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVvwt7NVKOk&feature=youtu.be&themeRefresh=1. Critics forcefully disagreed, viewing the move as a continuation of the neoliberal attack on poor and other marginalized communities. For critical accounts, see e.g. Shiva Bakhtiary, "Misguided cuts to Legal Aid Ontario's funding," The Lawyer's Daily (24 June 2019), online: http://www.thelawyersdaily.ca/articles/13270/misguided-cuts-to-legal-aid-ontario-s-funding-shiva-bakhtiary; Samantha Beattie & Emma Paling, "Legal Aid Cuts Designed to Muzzle Ford's Critics, Clinics Say," The Huffington Post (12 June 2019), online: https://www.huffpost.com/archive/ca/entry/legal-aid-ontario-slashes-toronto-budgets_ca_5d00f6b7e4b07551039acbb3; Jacques Gallant, "Sweeping Cuts to Legal Clinics Called a 'Directed Attack' on Toronto and Organizations Challenging Ford Government," The Toronto Star (12 June 2019), online: https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/sweeping-cuts-to-legal-clinics-called-a-directed-attack-on-toronto-and-organizations-challenging-ford/article_1bb1b71a-e919-5325-9307-8e440ce4057d.html [Gallant, "Sweeping Cuts"]; Emily Mathieu, "Toronto's most vulnerable residents will bear the cost of legal clinic cuts, advocates say," Toronto Star (12 June 2019), online: https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/toronto-s-most-vulnerable-residents-will-bear-the-cost-of-legal-clinic-cuts-advocates-say/article_55dc3337-f558-5c18-85b9-592113db345c.html; Jessica Owen, "Provincial review could jeopardize legal aid clinics: official," Barrie Today (24 June 2019), online: https://www.barrietoday.com/local-news/provincial-review-could-jeopardize-legal-aid-clinics-official-1520878; Chris Ramsaroop, "Cuts to legal clinics a sinister plan to harm the most vulnerable," Toronto Star (29 July 2019), online: https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/cuts-to-legal-clinics-a-sinister-plan-to-harm-the-most-vulnerable/article_235e4e03-55ec-5d54-94b6-eb17643d2d88.html; Toronto Star Editorial Board, "Ontario's New Attorney General Should Reverse Cuts to Legal Aid," Toronto Star (23 June 2019), online www.thestar.com/opinion/editorials/2019/06/23/ontarios-new-attorney-general-should-reverse-cuts-to-legal-aid.html. On forced changes to clinical case work, see Nicholas Keung, "Legal Aid Stops Taking New Immigration, Refugee Cases," Toronto Star (15 April 2019), online: www.thestar.com/news/gta/2019/04/15/legal-aid-stops-taking-new-immigration-refugee-cases.html.

12. See Ontario, Legislative Assembly, Official Report of Debates (Hansard), 42-1, No 143 (19 February 2020). The reforms were criticized in a report issued by a group of Ontario law professors, of which I am a signatory. See e.g. Mosher et al, "Neither Smarter nor Stronger: Bill 161 is a Step Backwards for Access to Justice and Community-Based Legal Services in Ontario" (9 March 2020), online: https://osgoode.yorku.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Bill-161-Brief-March-6-1.pdf; Jacques Gallant, "Ford government's legal aid plan will have 'profoundly negative' effect on low-income Ontarians, law professors say," Toronto Star (10 March 2020), online: https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/ford-government-s-legal-aid-plan-will-have-profoundly-negative-effect-on-low-income-ontarians/article_6efedf8b-1f5c-5b50-ab70-03ca81ed0259.html [Gallant, "Ford government"]. This article has been conceived in the midst of the modernization exercise. The explicit reference to modernization would no doubt bring pause to critical readers familiar with sociology and development studies, including law and development, where it has had a pervasive presence. Associated with the likes of Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, and later Walter Rostow, among countless others, modernization theory upholds foundational binary and hierarchical distinctions in Western or liberal political and legal knowledge production beginning with modern versus traditional and extending to developed versus underdeveloped, rich versus poor, and more. Rostow's work is particularly telling in that it identifies five stages of economic growth or development through which modern society is said to emerge, presenting a linear and regressive developmentalism meant to justify status quo global power relations. Its political significance, evident in the subtitle of his 1960 text The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, articulated a justificatory program to undermine the then growing momentum of colonial independence movements and their search for alternatives to orthodox capitalist development. It faced intense criticism within development studies from world systems and dependency theories, both of which sought to bring the "Third World" into the historical structure of global relations. In other words, critical suspicion of political reform agendas carried out under the modernization mantra is deep-seated and not misplaced. See Walter Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge University Press, 1960).

13. According to then Legal Aid Ontario Vice President of Clinic Law Services Jayne Mallin, "This was a really difficult exercise, because we recognize that there's value in systemic work because it creates efficiencies, we recognize there's value....But we also wanted to ensure that if we've got to take the money from somewhere, we did not want to take it from clinics providing direct client services in the community." See Mathieu, supra note 11. Here, then, the individual client-systemic work distinction forms a basis for carrying out the funding cuts and wider modernization exercise. For an alternative approach, see Gemma Smyth, "Evaluating Systemic Advocacy: A Primer & Tools for Evaluating Systemic Advocacy in Ontario's Legal Clinics" (Report to the Law Foundation of Ontario, 2017), online (pdf): University of Windsor http://www.scholar.uwindsor.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1049&context=lawpub.

14. Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Duke University Press, 2011). For an alternative account of visuality as a matrix of cultural practices and values, see Hal Foster, Vision and Visuality (Bay Press, 1988). https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822393726

15. While space does not permit a comprehensive development of Canadian state imperialism, it would be prudent to sketch the general contours of the claim. It develops from an understanding of the new imperialism or what Ellen Wood once termed an "empire of capital" emergent from about the mid-twentieth century onwards. See Empire of Capital (Verso, 2003). It is the idea that today's powerful states rely on global economic hegemony somewhat distinct from the imperial projects of European empires rooted in colonial rule. Though Wood's account is framed solely in terms of the US capitalist empire, the insights are generalizable. The continuing if not deepening need of global capital is for "a closely regulated and predictable social, political and legal order" (ibid at xi), which occurs through an "orderly" global system of multiple territorial states. The empire of capital, as Wood explains, is shaped by "the complex and contradictory relationship between capital's expansive economic power and the more limited reach of the extra-economic force that sustains it," a force mobilized through the sovereign state. See ibid at 5-6. States like Canada leverage economic hegemony, including to continue the subordination of other states (primarily of the global South), in service of global capitalist accumulation. Canada's ongoing settler-colonial dislocation and dispossession of Indigenous peoples and communal authority "at home," as Todd Gordon astutely shows, provides the ongoing basis for its imperialist excursions abroad. See Todd Gordon, Imperialist Canada (Arbeiter Ring, 2010). And as Gordon and Jeffrey Webber forcefully demonstrate, these violent extractivist excursions occur to devastating social and ecological effect throughout-and no doubt beyond-Latin America. See Todd Gordon & Jeffery R Webber, Blood of Extraction: Canadian Imperialism in Latin America (Fernwood, 2016). These deeply disturbing dynamics begin to explain how peoples of the world find themselves displaced and slotted into circuits of migration extending into neighbourhoods like south Parkdale. And yet, Canada is held out as a beacon of benevolence in global affairs, not as a purveyor or perpetrator of the world's problems. Indeed, what Anton Allahar and James Côté noted over two decades ago remains true today, Canada is a "nation in denial" over its colonial roots and racism and the class-based nature of its profoundly unequal society, and I would add over its capitalist imperialist interventions. See Richer and Poorer: The Structure of Inequality in Canada (James Lorimer & Company, 1998). For other useful works of interest, see e.g. Sherene Razack, Dark Threats and White Knights: The Somalia Affair, Peacekeeping and the New Imperialism (University of Toronto Press, 2004); Jerome Klassen & Greg Albo, eds, Empire's Ally: Canada and the War in Afghanistan (University of Toronto Press, 2013); Yves Engler & Anthony Fenton, Canada In Haiti: Waging War On the Poor Majority (Red, 2005). For an account pertaining to Caribbean migrant farm labour in Canada see Adrian A Smith, "'Troubling Project Canada': The Caribbean and the Making of 'Unfree Migrant Labour'" (2015) 40 Can J Latin American & Caribbean Studies 274.

16. "Marxism and Anti-Racism in Theory and Practice: Reflections and Interpretations" in Abigail B Bakan & Enakshi Dua, eds, Theorizing Anti-Racism: Linkages in Marxism and Critical Race Theories (University of Toronto Press, 2014) 127 at 140. For an influential early social movement account of radical prefigurative praxis, see Carl Boggs, "Marxism, Prefigurative Communism, and the Problem of Workers' Control" (1977) 11 Radical America 99 at 100. By "prefigurative," Boggs meant "the embodiment, within the ongoing political practice of a movement, of those forms of social relations, decision-making, culture, and human experience that are the ultimate goal." See ibid. Simply stated, a radical prefigurative politic refuses the use of certain liberal distinctions-between individual and systemic, means and ends, real(ism) and idea(ism), present and future, and so on-which subordinate emancipatory commitments to status quo or incremental ones. Motivated not by tinkering and other reformist measures, it is a commitment to building another world informed by our daily practices and agendas. It is apparent in a range of contexts. For instance, in a rhetorical exchange found in the ground-breaking text, Policing the Crisis, Stuart Hall and interlocutors, anticipating the charge that their proposals were idealistic and not suitable for the present, stated: "if someone says to us: 'Yes, but given the present conditions, what are we to do now ?', we can only reply 'Do something about the 'present conditions.'" Referencing Oscar Wilde, they go on to argue that "it is an outrage for reformers to spend time asking what can be done to ease the lot of the poor, or to make the poor bear their conditions with greater dignity, when the only remedy is to abolish the condition of poverty itself." See Stuart Hall et al, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (London & Basingstoke, 1978) at 4. For differing accounts and applications of radical prefigurative politics in and around law, see Robert Knox, "Strategy and Tactics" (2010) 21 FYBIL 193; Irina Ceric, Lawyering From Below: Activist Legal Support In Contemporary Canada and the US (PhD Dissertation, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, 2020) [unpublished]; Michael Blazer, "The Community Legal Clinic Movement In Ontario: Practice and Theory, Means and Ends" (1991) 7 J L & Soc Pol'y 49 at 52; Davina Cooper, "Prefiguring the State" (2017) 49 Antipode 335.

17. I concur with Pierre Bourdieu's contention that "to endeavour to think the state is to risk either taking over, or being taken over by, the thought of the state." Pierre Bourdieu, "Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field" in George Steinmetz ed, State/Culture: State-Formation after the Cultural Turn (Cornell University Press, 1999) at 53, cited in Mark Neocleous, Imagining the State (Open University Press, 2003) at 6 [Neocleous, Imagining the State]. As such, I follow Mark Neocleous who, in venturing to "think beyond the instructions and parameters" of the state, writes "against" and "outside the statist political imaginary" (ibid).

18. On social movement learning, see e.g. Aziz Choudry, Learning Activism: The Intellectual Life of Contemporary Social Movements (University of Toronto Press, 2015); Sara Carpenter & Shahrzad Mojab, Revolutionary Learning: Marxism, Feminism and Knowledge (Pluto Press, 2017); Paula Allman, Revolutionary Social Transformation: Democratic Hopes, Political Possibilities and Critical Education (Bergin & Garvey, 1999). For a rich account of Indigenous sovereignty, see Glen Coulthard, Red Skin, White Mask: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (University of Minnesota Press, 2014). On poor peoples' movements, see e.g. Frances Fox Piven & Richard A Cloward, Regulating the Poor: the Functions of Public Welfare, 2nd ed (Vintage Books, 1993); Bryan D Palmer & Gaétan Héroux, Toronto's Poor: A Rebellious History (Between the Lines, 2016).

19. Roscoe Pound, "Law in Books and Law in Action" (1910) 44 Am L Rev 12. Pound may have coined the terminology, but it was not until the emergence of legal realism that they found meaning, a meaning further developed by early socio-legal or what is also termed law and society scholarship. For a recent overview, see Jon B Gould & Scott Barclay, "Mind the Gap: The Place of Gap Studies in Sociolegal Scholarship" (2012) 8 Annual Rev L & Social Science 323. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-lawsocsci-102811-173833

20. The framing belongs to film scholar Karl Schoonover. See Karl Schoonover, "Wastrels of Time: Slow Cinema's Labouring Body, the Political Spectator, and the Queer" (2012) 53 Framework: J Cinema & Media 65. Credit to Hannah Frank's work for the initial reference. My use of the term "vision" breaks from that of Hal Foster's, which attaches a bio-physiological understanding associated with the human eye and corresponding visual system. See Foster, supra note 14.

21. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Yale University Press, 1998). The engagement with Scott's work pertains to its general method, and in particular, my account takes up the invitation to reimagine the method through a turn to the visual. It is not an attempt to adopt Scott's substantive claims. For one, the insights around visuality in colonial histories are not fully accounted for in Scott's framing.

22. By orthodox, I am referring to a whole host of approaches and perspectives that contest the need for rich and nuanced social contextualization as a necessary premise of legal education. In the contemporary period in which "social justice" figures prominently, these accounts adhere to a thin or shallow contextualization in which "law" and "society" are sharply delineated and jurists (including prospective ones) remain at the pinnacle of the schema.

23. As it unfolds in relation to non-clinical legal educational orthodoxy, clinical law teaching and practice offer critical insight into that orthodoxy but has had some difficulty escaping it--and it must come to grips with its own--in this latter respect. In other words, clinical education appears to have an orthodoxy too: engaged-contextualism.

24. See Harry J Glasbeek & Reuben A Hasson, "Some Reflections on Canadian Legal Education" (1987) 50 Mod L Rev 777. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.1987.tb01738.x

25. For a relatively recent account from a highly influential commentator in Canada, see Harry W Arthurs, "The Future of Law School: Three Visions and a Prediction" (2014) 51 Alta https://doi.org/10.29173/alr33 L Rev 705. For a US-based legal realist account that continues to carry a certain scholarly importance, see Karl N Llewellyn, The Bramble Bush: On our Law and its Study (Quid Pro Books, 2012). The critiques are voluminous but for an especially compelling one, see Patricia J Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor (Harvard University Press, 1991).

26. "Practicing Law for Poor People" (1970) 79 Yale LJ 1049 [Wexler, "Practicing"]. https://doi.org/10.2307/795211 In a follow-up reflection nearly four decades later, Wexler credits labour organizer and professor, Tim Sampson, with teaching him the lessons conveyed in the article. See Steve Wexler, "Some Further Reflections on Poor People and Law" (2007) 40 UBC L Rev 859. See also Gerald P Lopez, Rebellious Lawyering: One Chicano's Vision of Progressive Legal Practice (Westview Press, 1992).

27. A modest summation of the clinic-based critique of legal education suggests key deficiencies. Legal educational orthodoxy operates within what revolutionary educator Paulo Freire notably termed the "banking concept of education." See Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Continuum, 2005), ch 2. Such a model enforces hierarchies of knowledge production in which knowledge is seen to emanate from a singular interpretive authority, the professor, radiating out--or more properly down--to students. The classroom relations are organized along the same hierarchical and dualistic logic of the solicitor-client relationship and courtroom encounter where, cast as all-knowing deities, the jurist stands at the pinnacle.

28. Wexler, "Practicing," supra note 26 at 1049.

29. Ibid at 1050.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid. The theory of law implicit in Wexler's account is not entirely straightforward. The legal and the social are treated as distinct spheres, poverty is a--perhaps the--meeting point between these, and poor people seemingly cannot navigate around law's harmful protrusions.

32. Ibid at 1067.

33. Ibid. To the extent that legal educational reforms are considered by Wexler, it is to illustrate how certain curricular practices of the day, namely the addition of "Law and the Poor" courses-courses which in their very existence serve a "useful function" of reinforcing that "the remainder of the curriculum deals with law and the rich" (ibid at 1050). Not only do these curricular exceptions prove the norm, asserts Wexler, but they "do little...to change the law schools' treatment of legal problems, or their perception of the proper roles and concerns of a lawyer" (ibid). My suspicion is that the latter claim is far more controversial than the former, given the proliferation of "law and" courses across law schools in Canada since the time of Wexler's account-much of this spawned by interventions like Wexler's. These courses typically include instructors and students who share some interest in redressing the legal profession's service failures.

34. That said, Wexler is credited with encouraging the search for alternative approaches. See Frederick H Zemans, "The Dream Is Still Alive: Twenty-Five Years of Parkdale Community Legal Services and the Osgoode Hall Law School Intensive Program in Poverty Law" (1997) 35 Osgoode Hall LJ 499 at 503 [Zemans, "Dream"]. https://doi.org/10.60082/2817-5069.1579

35. Margaret Martin Barry, Jon C Dubin & Peter A Joy, "Clinical Legal Education for This Millennium: The Third Wave" (2000) 7 Clinical L Rev 1.

36. On the early history of legal aid clinics in Ontario specific to PCLS and more broadly,

see Zemans, "Dream," supra note 34; Mary Jane Mossman, Karen Schucher & Claudia Schmeing, "Comparing and Understanding Legal Aid Priorities: A Paper Prepared for Legal Aid Ontario" (2010) 29 Windsor Rev Legal Soc Issues 149.

37. Mary Jane Mossman, "Community Legal Clinics in Ontario" (1983) 3 Windsor YB Access Just 375 at 381 (noting that "all of the early legal aid clinics were established as alternatives to the government-funded legal aid Plan"). In the judicare system, lawyers in private practice provided analogous services under legal aid to those provided to traditional "fee-paying clients in certain areas, such as Supreme Court-related or related to serious criminal offences, where in other proceedings, including small claims court, family and tribunal, a local legal aid official wielded discretion over representation" (ibid at 385). Judicare, as Mossman et al note, adhered to "legal categories of services available to paying clients" (Mossman, Schucher & Schmeing, supra note 36 at 160). For accounts of the historical emergence of legal aid in Canada and Ontario respectively, see James Edmund Jones, "Legal Aid for the Poor" (1931) 9 Can Bar Rev 272

John D Honsberger, "The Ontario Legal Aid Plan" (1969) 15 McGill LJ

436. For an investigation into the rationale behind legal aid not strictly focused on Canada, see Richard Moorhead, "Legal Aid in the Eye of a Storm: Rationing, Contracting, and a New Institutionalism" (1998) 25 JL & Soc'y 365 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6478.00096

Richard L Abel, "Law without Politics: Legal Aid under Advanced Capitalism" (1985) 32 UCLA L Rev 474.

38. Zemans, "Dream," supra note 34 at 500.

39. The articulation of clinic service boundaries is identified as beneficial for the incorporation of community members into clinical governance, which occurred in a contested and protracted way, though, as we will see, the enforcement of catchment areas is a form of the clinic's mundane internalized projection of state power. For a discussion of the contested nature of community in early clinics see Mossman, supra note 37 at 393-97. The service boundaries have since been expanded, though not uncontroversially. In addition to controversies surrounding boundary struggles, clinical governance provided additional tensions. For instance, there were internal attempts to share decision-making responsibility among clinic staff and executives. As noted at the time, "The office developed a democratic and horizontal method of decision making. Wherever possible all decisions were brought to the 'community of workers' within the office for their discussion and resolution." See Zemans, "Dream," supra note 34 at 510. These were more properly understood as contested struggles which continued throughout. For some early insight from the perspective of a founding student see Doug Ewart, "Parkdale Community Legal Services: Community Law Office, or Law Office in a Community?" (1997) 35 Osgoode Hall LJ 475.

40. Ibid at 505. An early evaluation of the program, conducted by then Professor Roland Penner and referred to as the Penner Report, noted the "apparent conflict between quality legal services on a large scale and a legal education clinic operating on limited resources" (ibid at 505). Yet, in a November 1972 review conducted by a federal official, clinic financial resources were seen as strong: "[I]ts generous budget permits the hiring of personnel and the purchase of high-quality facilities without the need to skimp" (ibid at 519).

41. Mossman, supra note 37 at 384.

42. Zemans, "Dream," supra note 34 at 504. Others term it the Council on Legal Education and Professional Responsibility.

43. Aubrey McCutcheon, "University Legal Aid Clinics: A Growing International Presence with Manifold Benefits" in Mary McClymont & Stephen Golub, eds, Many Roads to Justice: The Law Related Work of Ford Foundation Grantees Around the World (The Ford Foundation, 2000) 267.

44. David M Trubek & Alvaro Santos, "Introduction: The Third Moment in Law and Development Theory and The Emergence of a New Critical Practice" in Trubek & Santos, eds, The New Law and Development: A Critical Appraisal (Cambridge University Press, 2006) 1. For an overview of US-based law and development, see James A Gardner, Legal Imperialism: American Lawyers and Foreign Aid in Latin America (University of Wisconsin, 1980) at 6-26. A critique is mounted in the remainder of the text. For the foundational account, see David M Trubek & Marc Galanter, "Scholars in Self-Estrangement: Some Reflections on the Crisis in Law and Development Studies in the United States" (1974) Wis L Rev 1062. For a recent reflection on Trubek and Galanter's piece, see Ruth Buchanan, "A Crisis and its Afterlife: Some Reflections on 'Scholars in Self-Estrangement'" in Gráinne de Búrca, Claire Kilpatrick & Joanne Scott, eds, Critical Legal Perspectives on Global Governance: Liber Amicorum David M Trubek (Hart, 2014).

45. James Gardner, a former official with the Ford Foundation, identified the flawed and imperialist assumptions upon which the projects operated. See Gardner, supra note 44. For a recent consideration of Gardner's account, which ultimately rejects the legal imperialist framing, see Richard J Wilson, "Beyond Legal Imperialism: U.S. Clinical Legal Education and the New Law and Development" in Frank S Bloch, ed, The Global Clinical Movement: Educating Lawyers for Social Justice (Oxford University Press, 2011). See also J P Sandy Ogilvy, "Celebrating CLEPR's 40th Anniversary: The Early Development of Clinical Legal Education and Legal Ethics Instruction in U.S. Law Schools" (2009) 16 Clinical L Rev. See generally Special Issue, CLEPR's 40th Anniversary: Papers and Speeches from the AALS-ABA-CLEA Celebration of CLEPR (2009) 16 Clinical L Rev [CLEPR Special Issue].

46. Mossman, Schucher & Schmeing, supra note 36 at 159.

47. Mossman, supra note 37 at 384; Gavigan, supra note 8.

48. Mossman, supra note 37 at 398. As Mossman noted in a 2019 talk during the clinic system's Access to Justice week, community legal clinics defined "access and justice" from the perspective of marginalized communities such that poverty law responded to the particular needs of those communities, always in the face of budgetary constraints. See Association of Community Legal Clinics of Ontario, "Access to Justice Week 2019-Mary Jane Mossman" (30 October 2019), online (video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdPZHNsRZb0&ab_channel=AssociationofCommunityLegalClinicsofOntario.

49. See Ewart, supra note 39 at 482. The journal article is a reprint of Ewart's article in the Osgoode student newspaper, Obiter Dicta, from 30 September 1971.

50. For instance, the coup d'état in Chile on 11 September 1973 mounted against the socialist Salvador Allende government installed dictator Augusto Pinochet which generated a flood of dissidents into Canada. The clinic system emerged as a way to support Chilean refugee claimants. Association of Community Legal Clinics of Ontario, "Fundamentals of Community Legal Clinics" (24 October 2018), online (video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofdfW6eQYp8&ab_channel=AssociationofCommunityLegalClinicsofOntario.

51. Mossman, supra note 37. Mossman suggests that clinics "extended the full range of services needed by the poor in the justice system" thereby "transform[ing] the concept of legal aid in Ontario" (ibid at 385). As Ontario's Grange Commission noted in its report, "[i]t was to plug these gaps that the clinical movement was born" (ibid at 385). In noting this, Mossman identified a regulatory mandate "to take on the systemic legal problems of the poor rather than to be limited to merely ad hoc remedies," drawing a distinction seemingly illustrative of differences in perspective at the time. See ibid at 398.

52. Jason Beckett, "Creating Poverty" in Anne Orford & Florian Hoffmann, eds, The Oxford Handbook of the Theory of International Law (Oxford University Press, 2016) 985 at 989. https://doi.org/10.1093/law/9780198701958.003.0048

53. Ibid at 989. As Beckett continues, "Poverty is created by socio-economic processes, and those processes are in turn effected through, and regulated by...law" and "[t]he processes of wealth creation and concentration are managed through law; consequently, the corollary processes of poverty creation are also creatures of law" (ibid).

54. See Joe Hermer & Janet Mosher, Disorderly People: Law and the Politics of Exclusion in Ontario (Fernwood, 2002); Dorothy E Chunn & Shelley AM Gavigan, "Welfare Law, Welfare Fraud, and the Moral Regulation of the 'Never Deserving' Poor" (2004) 13 Soc & Leg Stud 219 https://doi.org/10.1177/0964663904042552 ; Janet Mosher & Joe Hermer, Welfare Fraud: The Constitution of Social Assistance as Crime (Law Commission of Canada, 2005).

55. Jonathan Black-Branch, "A Pedagogic Paradigm Shift in Clinical Legal Education: Towards Placing Practical and Theoretical Knowledge on an Equal Footing?" Slaw (15 June 2017), online: https://www.slaw.ca/2017/06/15/a-pedagogic-paradigm-shift-in-clinical-legal-education-towards-placing-practical-and-theoretical-knowledge-on-an-equal-footing/ (stating that "[c] linics can take countless forms and deal with almost any area of law, but the key is that they are providing students the opportunity to practice as lawyers with close supervision").

56. Legal clinics, understood as an institutional mode or expression of legal practice-analytically distinct from other modes of practice such as law firm, in-house counsel, legal collective, and sole practitioner-emerged as a collectivized response to societal legal dilemmas.

57. Buhler, Marsden & Smyth, supra note 2 at 4.

58. For instance, a recurring criticism of the so-called gap studies prominent in law and society scholarship is that they are constructed narrowly as reformist policy prescriptions.

59. Buhler, Marsden & Smyth, supra note 2 at 4.

60. Ibid.

61. Ibid.

62. To a certain extent, these efforts have resulted in the erosion of well-worn divisions between skills and doctrine. See Shelley Gavigan & Sean Rehaag, "Poverty Law, Access to Justice, and Ethical Lawyering: Celebrating 40 Years of Clinical Education at Osgoode Hall Law School" (2014) 23 J L & Soc Pol'y 1. https://doi.org/10.60082/0829-3929.1187

63. Shin Imai, "A Counter-Pedagogy for Social Justice: Core Skills for Community Lawyering" 9 Clinical L Rev 195 at 200. Imai calls on the clinical instructor to "integrate the teaching of community lawyering skills throughout the clinical course by teaching substantive law using techniques and exercises that are informed by the counter-pedagogy" (ibid at 200).

64. Ibid. Imai identifies a symmetry between classroom learning and community organizing work. He discusses "the problem-solving approach" to clinical teaching in which participants, who are actively engaged in sharing the "sense of responsibility for making contributions" (ibid at 203), "begin with a consideration of ill-structured everyday problems. Each problem is approached, not as a given, but as a starting point for an inquiry into the social context in which the problem is embedded" (ibid at 204).

65. I say daunting because, having previously spent a great deal of teaching energy encouraging students to become comfortable with the discomfort of asking difficult questions, I now find myself in a strangely disorienting position of clinical "insider" in which posing such questions can be interpreted as profane.

66. I am referring to Marxist historian EP Thompson's brilliant characterization of law in capitalist society-a critique of crude "base-superstructure" formulations. The original quote reads: "I found that law did not keep politely to a 'level' but was at every bloody level; it was imbricated within the mode of production and productive relations themselves (as property-rights, definitions of agrarian practice) and it was simultaneously present in the philosophy of Locke; it intruded brusquely within alien categories, reappearing bewigged and gowned in the guise of ideology; it danced a cotillion with religion, moralising over the theater of Tyburn; it was an arena of politics and politics was one of its arms; it was an academic discipline, subjected to the rigour of its own autonomous logic; it contributed to the definition of self-identity both of rulers and of ruled; above all, it afforded an arena for class struggle, within which alternative notions of law were fought out." See EP Thompson, "The Poverty of Theory or an Orrery of Errors (1978)" in EP Thompson, ed, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (Merlin Press, 1978) 96.

67. Supra note 8.

68. Lorne Sossin, "Experience the Future of Legal Education" (2014) 51 Alta L Rev 849 https://doi.org/10.29173/alr41. Entrenched to the extent that experiential education initiatives, and the emphasis on "practice readiness," as narrowly constructed, professionalizing trends, are becoming the expected norm in legal education.

69. Ibid.

70. To be sure, clinical education has helped to reshape the orthodoxy-experiential education is what some call this outcome. But, the question becomes, how does one escape the prevailing sensibilities?

71. For instance, programs have emerged that carry the name "clinical" but that share little with the core sensibilities.

72. This is not a comprehensive list but rather some admittedly anecdotal personal reflections identified during my period as Academic Director, undoubtedly informed by my scattered recollections as a former placement student at PCLS nearly two decades prior. I have left a great deal of detailed reflection out. It is worth saying that I do not intend to suggest that all placement students subscribe to these views. While in certain cases they do, they also reflect considered perspectives of students themselves who have identified them as part of a critique of their fellow clinical students and others.

73. Dorothy E Smith, The Conceptual Practices of Power: A Feminist Sociology of Knowledge (Northeastern University Press, 1990) at 62.

74. Ibid at 40; Dorothy E Smith, Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for People (AltaMira Press, 2005). For a sophisticated deployment of Smith's rich ideas, see Himani Bannerji, Thinking Through: Essays on Feminism, Marxism, and Anti-Racism (Women's Press, 1995).

75. There is an intriguing but seemingly under-explored parallel between clinical praxis and qualitative research which finds its expression during regular in-class discussions and student research projects (i.e., a final research paper produced to draw on a student's placement experience). That said, anecdotally, I have found that university-level research ethics approval processes do not sufficiently contemplate the unique position of clinical students as legal practitioners and researchers situated within social context.

76. Sarah Buhler, "Troubled Feelings: Moral Anger and Clinical Legal Education" (2014) 37 Dal LJ 397, Sarah Buhler, "Painful Injustices: Encountering Social Suffering in Clinical Legal Education" (2013) 19 Clinical L Rev 405. Buhler's thoughtful consideration of the relationship between law and emotions contests the privileging of dispassionate engagements in liberal law. Students in the academic seminar regularly raised concerns about their role in the "performance of trauma" of their clients, as several students put it. Others objected to the claimed objectivity embedded in case file-based storytelling and narrative construction in legal pleadings.

77. The established refrain that poor people experience different legal problems than non-poor people can be taken as a claim of exceptionalism.

78. Consider how one would distinguish between the teaching, learning, and law practice dimensions of clinical legal education. With respect to the relations of pedagogical instruction, certain questions are raised. Who teaches and learns from whom? How do each of these occur and on what terms? In what contexts do teaching and learning occur and how do we account for the role of context? It is not meant as a way to enforce a distinction between the course instructor, clinical practitioners, and administrative support staff. Indeed, we begin to see the emergence of a tension between the ways in which academic teaching and learning are associated with instructor and professional law and legal practice-enforced through a division of labour. Instruction flows not just from the course instructor, in the clinical context, but from supervisory staff through the production of practice-oriented knowledge. Teaching and learning remain compartmentalized such that the classroom encounter is privileged and even fetishized as the site of academic knowledge. A sharp distinction between the academic and the real is readily enforced. Supervisory staff are not always recognized for their role in teaching, and, in turn, organizational divisions of labour are treated as the unquestioned basis of authority. This serves to carry over hierarchies of power into teaching. The authority and directional flow of knowledge production also fail to be problematized. Community members are regarded as clients, not as capable knowledge contributors or producers.

79. Constance Backhouse has argued that the "very concept of 'professionalism' has been inextricably linked…to masculinity, whiteness, class privilege, and Protestantism." See "Gender and Race in the Construction of 'Legal Professionalism': Historical Perspectives" (First Colloquium on the Legal Profession, Faculty of Law, University of Western Ontario, 20 October 2003) at 3. See also Michael D Ornstein, Racialization and Gender of Lawyers in Ontario: A Report for the Law Society of Upper Canada (LSUC, April 2010).

80. Wexler, supra note 26; Paul R Tremblay, "Rebellious Lawyering, Regnant Lawyering, and Street-Level Bureaucracy" (1992) 43 Hastings LJ 947.

81. The earliest academic course work for clinic students congealed around pedagogical treatment of lawyering as process. Zemans, supra note 34. See also Ron Ellis, "The Ellis Archives--1972 to 1981: An Early View from the Parkdale Trenches" (1997) 35 Osgoode Hall LJ 536; Gavigan, supra note 8. I draw on social movement conceptualizations https://doi.org/10.60082/2817-5069.1580 of advocacy, anchored in overlapping modes of solidarity related to decolonization, abolitionism, and "internationalism from below," below.

82. For instance, clinical law professor Lucie White once posed the following set of prescient questions in "The Transformative Potential of Clinical Legal Education" (1997) 35 Osgoode Hall LJ 603 at 609: "[H]ow much potential do we really have to change ourselves-the profession and the pedagogy of lawyering-before we cease to be lawyers in any common sense meaning of the term? We can only address that question as we work to stretch the boundaries of the lawyer role through new, less lawyer-dominated advocacy practices. Second, as a practical matter, how do we find time for self-transformation amid the pressing demands of our day to day work? And how do we motivate our students to challenge the lawyer's traditional privilege, just as they are beginning to enjoy it? And third, why should we bother taking the challenge of self-transformation seriously? Why should we worry over the ethical questions that are embedded in our claim to transform others? Why should we seek to change our own self-concepts and modes of practice? Why not just get on with the urgent work of helping the poor?"

83. Ibid. The question conforms with, as White put it, a "challenge to our own legitimacy as the agents of other people's transformation" (ibid at 609). White asks: "Can we, as progressive clinicians, transform who we are, how we see ourselves, what we do-our own practices-so as to open those practices to the knowledge, power, and human agency of the people with whom we work? Do we as clinical legal educators have any potential to deprivilege our own self-concepts, routines, and institutions, in the interest of a more collaborative practice of advocacy toward social justice?" In terming transformative interests as "vanguardist pretensions," White expressly aligns with what she identifies as postmodernist legal and political thought and leadership-pointing to the likes of Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Michel Foucault, and Nelson Mandela. According to White, a transformative agenda "replicates" the subordination of poor people "to the world-making power of the elites who dominate their lives." See ibid at 608-610.

84. Boundaries are stretched and blurred, ideas and concepts revised, sensibilities shifted, and practices reconsidered; reform is the outcome. If this evidence of struggle over disciplinarity signifies anything, it is that, to the extent that we can be seen collectively, legal scholars show a real spatial ingenuity in terms of moving around "the problem"-the problem of the socially and ecologically destructive nature of capitalist relations-without necessarily addressing root causes. There is a sense that we as scholars are always and forever re-disciplining. The particular nature of legal disciplinary engagements is so modest, so measured, so sensible, and practical that modesty, judiciousness, sensibility, and practicality form the sensibilities through which accepted debate is permitted to occur.

85. Is seeing like a clinic akin to seeing like the state? Not necessarily, although a recurring preoccupation-one might even say anxiety-of distinct cohorts of PCLS students is about placement work vis-à-vis the work of the state. Students regularly express discomfort about this relationship, ranging from mild concern to expressions of guilt.

86. I am borrowing loosely from Mirzoeff's account, though I have not sought to maintain complete congruence. Visuality, as Mirzoeff tells us, "is not a trendy theory word meaning the totality of all visual images and devices" but rather is "an early-nineteenth-century term meaning the visualization of history." See Mirzoeff, supra note 14 at 2. Here, I use it to capture the visualization of the history of political-legal or liberal state authority.

87. This occurs through what Mark Neocleous now refers to as police power, understood as wide-ranging powers through which social order is produced and subjectivities constituted. It is structural power tied to visuality. See The Fabrication of Social Order: A Critical Theory of Police Power (Pluto Press, 2000) [Neocleous, Fabrication].

88. Judah Schept, "Visuality and Criminology" in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Crime, Media, and Popular Culture (Oxford University Press, 2016). For insights on social order, see Neocleous, Fabrication, supra note 87. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264079.013.145

89. Schept, supra note 88.

90. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, 1991).

91. Neocleous, Imagining the State, supra note 17 at 119. The map served as "part of the totalizing classificatory grid" utilized by the state to "stabilize" and enforce order and apprehend civil society. See ibid at 121.

92. See e.g. John C Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State (Cambridge University Press, 2000).

93. Anderson, supra note 90 at 184.

94. Scott, supra note 21 at 81-82.

95. For a recent critical take on the application of Scott's method in law and development, see Fleur Johns, "From Planning to Prototypes: New Ways of Seeing Like a State" (2019) 82 Mod L Rev 833. For a critique in the context of urban governance, see Mariana Valverde, "Seeing Like A City: The Dialectic of Modern and Premodern Ways of Seeing in Urban Governance" (2011) 45 Law & Soc'y Rev 277. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5893.2011.00441.x

96. Scott, supra note 21 at 2. The techniques of legibility and simplification gain authority through an appeal to scientific rationality and, due to their authoritative nature, fall on the law-administration continuum or as an aspect of police power, to follow Neocleous's account.

97. Ibid. Scott contends that the development of these techniques, in planning, statistics, engineering, and elsewhere, occurred at the expense of local and practical knowledge or what he terms "métis."

98. Schept, supra note 88; Nicholas Mirzoeff, "The Right to Look" (2011) 37 Critical Inquiry 473 [Mirzoeff, "The Right to Look"]; Mirzoeff, supra note 14. In teasing out how social order is made and remade, there is a concern that a singular focus on order disregards the persistence of disorder. The understanding is borne out of a refusal to uphold a binary distinction between order and disorder of social relations. Disorder is not "synonymous with an absence of order" but rather, to employ Anwar Shaikh's framing, "the resulting systemic order is generated in-and-through continual disorder." Disorder, as Shaikh asserts, is an "immanent mechanism" of order. See Anwar Shaikh, Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises (Oxford University Press, 2016) at 5. The approach marks an acknowledgment of disorder as formative to visuality, whether through the devices mentioned in text, through institutional forms like prisons, or through other methods of capture. These capturing methods, simplifications of coding and statistical counting, and a range of modes of surveillance function under the guise of liberal security, as Neocleous and others indicate.

99. Mirzoeff, "The Right to Look," supra note 98 at 480.

100. Ibid.

101. This includes the material relations and logics of state authority, and intertwined articulations or branches of settler colonialism and capitalist imperialism.

102. See e.g. Coulthard, supra note 18; Tia Dafnos, "Pacification and Indigenous Struggles in Canada" (2013) 9 Socialist Studies 57; Shiri Pasternak, Governing Authority: The Algonquins of Barriere Lake Against the State (University of Minnesota Press, 2017). https://doi.org/10.18740/S49G6R

103. Shiri Pasternak, "Jurisdiction and Settler Colonialism: Where Do Laws Meet" (2014) 29 CJLS 145 at 145. https://doi.org/10.1017/cls.2014.5

104. See e.g. Gordon, supra note 15; Gordon & Webber, supra note 15; Adrian A Smith, "Troubling 'Project Canada': The Caribbean and the Making of 'Unfree Migrant Labor'" 40 Can J Latin American & Caribbean Studies 275.

105. Generally stated, liberalism is the default political mode of the Canadian state. The structure of the liberal state emerged out of the struggle over processes of visuality and the state's general thrust to capture a population and impose order through repressive enforcement of law. However, the historical contingency of that struggle is shaped by the state's liberalized formation or default form. The liberal foundations of the Canadian state-the state-civil society separation governed by the rule of law as expressed through liberal constitutionalism and filtered through statutory and common law-pushes struggle into a nationally-bounded form. Yet the essential relations of private property and contract, and credit, breach national boundedness and so capitalists, motivated by worldwide market development, are not necessarily constrained by the state's national form.

106. Legal Aid Services Act, RSO 1998, c 26 [LASA]. The Doug Ford regime passed new legislation governing legal aid in the province in the spring of 2020. See Legal Aid Services Act, 2020, RSO 2020, c 11 [LASA II]. Proposed in late 2019, and momentarily delayed during the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, LASA II came into force in October 2021. Among other changes, the new statutory regime grants LAO the authority to renegotiate agreements with individual community clinics. For criticisms see Mosher et al, supra note 12; Gallant, "Ford government," supra note 12. For more general criticisms surrounding the project, see e.g. Gallant, "Sweeping Cuts," supra note 11.

107. Clinics are recognized as "the foundation for the provision of legal aid services in the area of clinic law." See LASA, supra note 106, s 14(3). Legal aid certificates and duty counsel are the other two forms of legal aid in Ontario. LASA's mandate is organized around "clinic law," defined as the areas of law that particularly affect low-income individuals or disadvantaged communities. This includes legal matters related to: (1) housing and shelter, income maintenance, social assistance, and other similar government programs; and (2) human rights, health, employment, and education.

108. I intervene not to question the persistence of the struggle, nor should my intervention be misconstrued as an ad hominem attack on any given set of people within the clinic system. It is instead a critique operating at a rather general level of abstraction sufficient to capture and consider the place of PCLS in the social world, with a view to reorienting it in terms of location and requisite commitments. I gesture towards ways in which this might be carried out. The intervention relies upon a skeletal critique of the political economy of social welfare provisioning in capitalist societies, paying special attention to how claims of scarcity are deployed as a political-legal mechanism utilized to delimit social welfare or resource allocation. It implicitly rejects the production of scarcity or "fixed resources" in the ongoing practices of Ontario's provincial government. See McCamus et al, Report of the Ontario Legal Aid Review: A Blueprint for Publicly Funded Legal Services (Ontario Legal Aid Review, 1997) at 67. "[T]he problem of priority-setting for legal aid in the context of fixed resources requires consideration of some fundamental questions of public policy." See Mossman et al, "Comparing and Understanding Legal Aid Priorities: A Paper Prepared for Legal Aid Ontario" (2010) 29 Windsor Rev Legal & Soc Issues 149 at 150-51. For a recent discussion on the political dimensions of scarcity, see Nicholas Hildyard, "Scarcity, 'Polite Society' and Activism" (2019) 101 Geoforum 294. A critique of scarcity is also pertinent for the divisional work undertaken at PCLS, whether in terms of tenancy and the discourse of absence of affordable housing, labour markets and the absence of decent work, the allocation of residency status, or the provisioning of social assistance and disability support payments.

109. For a discussion see Blazer, supra note 16; Lenny Abramowicz, "The Critical Characteristics of Community Legal Aid Clinics in Ontario" (2004) 19 J L & Soc Pol'y 70; Michael Cormier, "A Response to the Critical Characteristics of Community Legal Aid Clinics in Ontario" (2004) 19 J L & Soc Pol'y 82. See also Ministry of the Attorney General, Legal Aid Ontario Review (26 April 2017), online: https://wayback.archive-it.org/16312/20210402050614/http://www.attorneygeneral.jus.gov.on.ca/english/about/pubs/lao_review/. https://doi.org/10.60082/0829-3929.1028

110. On the origins of the tensions over clinical independence and legal aid funding support, including in the Osler Task Force and Grange Report, see Mossman, supra note 37 at 382- 84. LASA contains a recognition of clinics and clinic law services. The legislation also includes provisions that ensure clinics are independent community-based organizations, with the right to determine the needs of their communities and the appropriate services to meet those needs, including systemic services such as law reform, community development, test cases, and public legal education.

111. For a trenchant critique of the construction of clients' legal service needs, see Tremblay, supra note 80.

112. Parker explains that "[t]he first wave of access to justice reform focused on increasing the availability of formal legal means of access to justice by increasing access to lawyers' services." See Christine Parker, Just Lawyers: Regulation and Access to Justice (Oxford University Press, 1999) at 31-32. For a more general account specific to Canada, see Trevor Farrow, "What is Access to Justice?" (2014) 51 Osgoode Hall LJ 957. See also Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, "Understanding Effective Access to Justice" (Workshop paper delivered at the OECD Conference, Paris, 3 November 2016).

113. The phrase, "poor people don't count," may come from James Galbraith, cited in David Schweickart, "How Rethinking Capitalism May Save the Planet" (4 April 2019) at 00h:17m:05s, online (podcast): CBC Ideas https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/how-rethinking-capitalism-may-save-the-planet-1.5084547.

114. Luann Good Gingrich & Naomi Lightman, "The Empirical Measurement of a Theoretical Concept: Tracing Social Exclusion among Racial Minority and Migrant Groups in Canada" (2015) 3 Soc Inclusion 98. https://doi.org/10.17645/si.v3i4.144

115. Legal Aid Ontario, "Legal Aid Ontario's Financial Eligibility Guidelines" (November 2016), online: https://www.legalaid.on.ca/more/corporate/about-lao-landing-page/legal-aid-ontarios-financial-eligibility-guidelines/.

116. Between 2016 and 2017, the highest-funded clinic in Ontario received $145 per low-income person in its catchment area, compared with eleven dollars per low-income person for the lowest-funded clinic. Office of the Auditor General of Ontario, "2018 Annual Report" (5 December 2018), online (pdf): https://www.auditor.on.ca/en/content/annualreports/arreports/en18/v1_305en18.pdf.

117. It is worth noting that government financial support for legal aid in Ontario has been mostly stagnant or declining in recent decades, though modest provincial increases have occurred more recently. This helps to explain these problematic financial eligibility guidelines. See Frederick Zemans & Justin Amaral, "A Current Assessment of Legal Aid in Ontario" (2018) 29 J L & Soc Pol'y 1. https://doi.org/10.60082/0829-3929.1310

118. One concern about producing community work metrics is that it renders clinical legal service work "transactional." The metrification of community work also undermines a key social movement insight: that success is a contingent value and that failure is common. See e.g. Choudry, supra note 18; Frances Fox Piven & Richard A Cloward, Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed and How They Fail (Vintage Books, 1979).

119. For instance, in certain circles measurement equates to accountability and has been elevated to a level approaching a legal right-the right to be measured, perhaps. The concept of "right" claims both recognition and representation, which are seen to either bolster or displace redistributive claims. Lenin once remarked that "[i]n capitalist society, statistics were entirely a matter for 'government servants', or for narrow specialists; we must carry statistics to the people and make them popular." V I Lenin, Collected Works, 4th ed, vol 27 (Progress, 1972) 235, online: Marxists Internet Archive https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/mar/x03.htm. This view can be taken with the dictum-often attributed to Albert Einstein but in fact from sociologist William Bruce Cameron-that "not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." William Bruce Cameron, Informal Sociology: A Casual Introduction to Sociological Thinking (Random House, 1963) at 29.For an intervention on quantification and measurement in the project(s) of international development, see Ruth Buchanan, Kimberley Byers & Kristina Mansveld, "'What Gets Measured Gets Done': Exploring the Social Construction of Globalized Knowledge for Development" in Moshe Hirsch & Andrew Lang, eds, Research Handbook on the Sociology of International Law (Edward Elgar, 2018).

120. For a critique of the framing "the poor," see Hermer & Mosher, supra note 54.

121. See Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1, translated by Samuel Moore & Edward Aveling (Progress, 1887).

122. Clinical legal education is not given serious attention in LASA. Clinical teaching occurs through partnerships between respective legal clinics and law schools and faculties. In the case of PCLS, the Osgoode Hall partnership is organized through a Memorandum of Understanding.

123. In this respect, we might say that poverty law superintends the making of capitalist order. Scarcity is one of the defining ways in which this occurs.

124. Robin D G Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Beacon Press, 2002).

125. Wexler, "Practicing," supra note 26 at 1050.

126. For longstanding examples characterized as the pursuit of "internationalism from below," see David Featherstone, Solidarity: Hidden Histories and Geographies of Internationalism (Zed Books, 2012).

127. Mirzoeff, supra note 14 at 1. Here "right" does not signify "liberal right," and thus the framing sidesteps well-rehearsed controversies surrounding rights and liberalism. For a recent critique of rights, see Radha D'Souza, What's Wrong with Rights: Social Movements, Law and Liberal Imaginations (Pluto Press, 2018).

128. Albert Einstein, Einstein on Cosmic Religion and Other Opinions and Aphorisms (Dover, 2009) at 97, cited in Stephen Gill, Critical Perspectives on the Crisis of Global Governance: Reimagining the Future (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) at xiv.

129. Stated differently, professional legal knowledge is a commodity indebted to police power.

130. Jamie Cassels & Maureen Mahoney, "Critical Legal Education: Paralysis with a Purpose" (1989) 4 Can J L & Soc'y 99 at 125. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0829320100001551

131. Frank S Bloch, The Global Clinical Movement: Educating Lawyers for Social Justice (Oxford University Press, 2011); CLEPR Special Issue, supra note 45; Richard J Wilson, The Global Evolution of Clinical Legal Education: More Than a Method (Cambridge University Press, 2018); Gavigan, supra note 8.

132. Adrian A Smith, "Bordering on Racism: Police Power and the 'Fugitive Movement' of Unfree Migrant Labour" [on file with author].

133. See Adrian A Smith, "Toward a Critique of Political Economy of 'Sociolegality' in Settler Capitalist Canada" in Mark Thomas et al, eds, Change and Continuity: Canadian Political Economy in the New Millennium (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2019).

134. Susan Buck-Morss, "Envisioning Capital: Political Economy on Display" (1995) 21 Critical Inquiry 434 at 460-61. Buck-Morss chastises the professionalization of western economic thought with the introduction of neoclassical economics: "The attempt to purge the "science" of economics from such concerns about normative values marks the deepest epistemological break between the classical economists of the late eighteenth century and the neoclassical economists at the nineteenth century's close...[e]conomic theory is now concerned with the far narrower task of describing "laws" that account for regularities of market behaviour as a self-interested rationality of means, while it remains totally indifferent to the normative questions about the reasonableness of individual motives or the substantive rationality of social ends."

135. Ibid at 463 [emphasis in original]. Buck-Morss explains further: "Neoclassical economics is microeconomics. Minimalism is characteristic of its visual display. In the crossing of the supply-demand curve, none of the substantive problems of political economy are resolved, while the social whole simply disappears from sight. Once this happens, critical reflection on the exogenous conditions of a "given" market situation becomes impossible, and the philosophy of political economy becomes so theoretically impoverished that it can be said to come to an end."

136. Ibid at 466-67 [emphasis added].

137. For instance, commercial landlords, gig economy employers, and social assistance and immigration status purveyors, among others, give off visual cues and displays of visuality.

138. Angela Davis, "Legacies and Unfinished Activisms" (Steve Biko Memorial Lecture, University of South Africa, 9 September 2016), cited in Aziz Choudry & Salim Vally, History's Schools: Past Struggles and Present Realities (Routledge, 2018) at 13 [emphasis added].

139. See EP Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (Penguin Books, 1985) at 266. "The forms and rhetoric of law acquire a distinct identity which may, on occasion, inhibit power and afford some protection to the powerless. Only to the degree that this is seen to be so can law be of service in its other aspect, as ideology" (ibid). For the original, see Rex v Sussex Justices, [1924] 1 KB 256 ("Justice must not only be done, but must also be seen to be done").

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