Community Legal Clinics in Ontario

Ontario has a system of fully funded yet independent network of community law clinics like those advocated in Rees\u27 paper. Professor Mossman explores the forces that led to the establishment of the community clinics, their relationships to the judicare system and the purposes behind the government\u27s assumption of responsibility for funding and defunding clinics: service to low income people, community involvement and representation and independence from funding sources. While Rees seems to suggest that government funded community clinics would automatically further these purposes, Mossman argues that scope of service, community involvement and funding decision processes must be structured very carefully in order to enhance clinics\u27 abilities to engage in meaningful representation, and warns that the early community clinic movement could be easily subverted by concentrating decision making control over clinics in the hands of the government, the law society, the clinic or even of other community groups