The grim parade: Supreme Court of Canada self-represented appellants in 2017

Self-represented litigants (SRLs) are persons who appear in legal proceedings without a lawyer. This study is a document- and court record-based quantitative, statistically valid profile of 122 SRLs who filed 125 leave to appeal applications in the Supreme Court of Canada in 2017. This investigation successfully developed a profile of the 2017 Supreme Court leave to appeal SRL population and their litigation activity and provides a model for future parallel investigations. This population is very unlikely to be representative of Canadians SRLs as a whole, but it represents a comparator and identifies characteristics that are potentially useful to understand what occurs in other Canadian appeal courts.