a peer-reviewed academic journal at
the Lincoln Alexander School of Law
about the
tmu law review
Founded in 2022, the TMU Law Review is a double-blind peer-reviewed journal published annually through the Lincoln Alexander School of Law at Toronto Metropolitan University. Currently operating as a faculty-led model with the support of a student editorial and operations team, the TMU Law Review is dedicated to publishing high-quality and cutting-edge scholarly and creative work that speaks to some of the most important issues affecting the contemporary legal and social landscape, both in Canada and beyond. In addition to our knowledge mobilization efforts, the TMU Law Review also provides valuable opportunities for its student members to develop key skills for their academic and professional careers and enrich their legal education through exposure to a greater breadth of scholarly discourse.
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The TMU Law Review is an open access journal. All content is published online on our website and is free to the public. In furtherance of our mission, we are committed to the principles of open access publishing and the benefits it brings, namely, more equitable access, affordability, and readership of scholarly works within the public, academic and legal communities, and increased transparency of publicly funded research.
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The journal will be available via Westlaw, LexisNexis Academic, HeinOnline, and CanLII, and will be indexed in Index to Legal Periodicals, Index to Canadian Legal Literature, and LegalTrac.
mission
statement
The TMU Law Review seeks to publish scholarship that reflects the core pillars of the Lincoln Alexander School of Law. Without limiting our scope, we are particularly committed to increasing and enhancing understandings of the theoretical and practical obstacles to justice and access to justice that many Canadians face, and how we can work towards envisioning and establishing a more equitable, effective, and efficient justice system for all, especially those who have historically been—and continue to be—systematically excluded, discriminated against, and underserved by Canada’s colonial legal order.
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Access to justice is increasingly recognized as constituting a crucial component of the rule of law and functional democracies. At the same time, access to justice has been identified as being a major challenge in the Canadian legal system. By this point, the barriers to access to justice are well-documented, and include prohibitive costs, unreasonable delays, and lack of information and transparency across virtually every area of legal practice. However, defining and operationalizing access to justice has proven to be a more difficult endeavour.
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Beyond a narrow characterization of access to justice as simply improving access to legal services and courts, the TMU Law Review strives to advance a conceptualization of access to justice (and solutions to access to justice problems) in a more holistic sense, encompassing fairness in both process and outcomes across public and private law settings. For whom is access to justice a pressing problem, and by whom should access to justice solutions be implemented? What role does the law and do legal professionals play in addressing underlying inequalities in political power and socio-economic status that preclude an equal enjoyment of legal rights, and what are the limitations of the law in this respect? What role can and should new technologies play in enhancing access to justice, and what kinds of obstacles are such technologies creating or perpetuating? These are just a few of the kinds of questions that we aim to critically engage with in this journal, from a diversity of perspectives, disciplinary lenses, and approaches to scholarship.