Canada is facing an access to justice crisis. Our legal system has been labelled as “complacent”, slow, inconsistent, and overwhelmingly expensive. Worse still, we lack the data we need to create solutions. Canada has a legal data deficit: we know more about professional sports teams than we do about our legal system and the individuals in it. We simply lack comprehensive, cohesive data about how our legal system works and how it does not. One thing, however, is quite clear: our legal system is not based on any deliberate design. Its patchy foundation rests on rebellion, precedent, tradition, and inertia. Unfortunately, little has changed: patchy, knee-jerk, intuition-based reforms are continually imposed on the legal system.

My research project—Deliberate Design: Why Canada’s Legal System Needs It—builds on previous research to examine how judicial decision-making and judicial decisions interact with Canada’s access to justice crisis, the data deficit, and the absence of deliberate design. The objective of my research is two-fold: (1) improve judicial decision-making by attempting to make it more consistent, predictable, timely, and less prone to error—including improper reliance on heuristics and cognitive bias; and (2) improve judicial decisions’ structure, accessibility, content, timeliness, length, and data-richness. Distilled down, I am trying to answer one question in my PhD research: “How might we improve Canadian judicial decision-making and Canadian judicial decisions?”