Our Mission

In 2013, the Manitoba Law Journal obtained its first-ever Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council grant. Since then, further strides have been taken, including incorporating an annual special issue on Criminal Law, producing special issues on legal history and pioneering the introduction of the Journal to cyberspace, including publishing its first e-book version, upgrading its website, and posting its content on more free-access websites. The Manitoba Law Journal’s overall vision is now:

• to encourage and publish material that is of scholarly depth, precision and independence, and at the same time readable and engaging;
• to focus on issues that are particularly relevant to our own population in Manitoba. We recognize that we have a diverse society that includes Indigenous peoples, longstanding residents and recent immigrants, and that Manitoba’s economy ranges from the traditional to the hyper-modern;
• to welcome thoughtful work from across the philosophical and political spectrums; the academy must be a forum for searching exploration and debate, not the mere repetition of orthodoxy of any kind;
• to encourage the application of ideas from other jurisdictions in Canada and around the world;
• to ensure that our insights into our own society contribute to understanding at the national and international levels;
• to embrace all useful methodologies, including traditional legal argument, social sciences, and work of an empirical or statistical nature;
• to support the investigation of issues through means that include interviews with active participants, as well as the review of documents; the techniques of responsible journalism should not be alien to law journals;
• to welcome contributors from all backgrounds, including practising lawyers, judges, academics, and authors who are experts in a wide variety of disciplines apart from law;
• to study the past, the present and the future. We have published special issues that have recovered and reflected on the lives and contributions of outstanding jurists; we seek to ensure that our volumes are produced quickly enough to reflect current events; the Journal is also a forum for predictions and prescriptions about the future;
• to follow the recommendations of The Truth and Reconciliation Commission with respect to legal education. In fact, the next Special Issue of the Journal will be focused on Indigenous Peoples and Oral History, and will include career retrospectives by the first wave of Indigenous jurists to attend law school and go on to practice.

A more in depth description of the MLJ's mission statement can found in the various UTGB prefaces, compiled here, as well as the preface in volume 35 issue 1 of the MLJ, which can be downloaded here.

MLJ content is open source (freely available without charge to the user) on this website, our homepage, and on CanLII. MLJ content is also carried on LexisNexis Quicklaw Advance, Westlaw Next and HeinOnline and included in the annual rankings of law journals by the leading service, the Washington and Lee University annual survey.