About

The BC Access to Justice Centre for Excellence (ACE) was established at the University of Victoria, Faculty of Law late in 2015 in response to the growing concern within the justice community about the problem of diminishing access to justice, and in the belief that there is a unique and important role that the academy can and should play in the resolution of this problem.

The idea for the Centre arose out of the Canadian Bar Association’s Equal Justice report of December, 2013 which proposed that by 2030 three Canadian law schools establish centres of excellence for access to justice research. That report emphasized the paucity of access to justice research and the poor state of metrics and data collection within Canadian civil justice systems and the potential for law schools to help rectify this.  Observing that “you can’t manage what you can’t measure” the CBA drew an explicit link between the system’s lack of metrics and measurement capacity, and the relative ineffectiveness of efforts over the last twenty years to enhance access to civil justice.