According to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Section 15 (1)):

Every individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination and, in particular, without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.

Of course, and unfortunately, this is not always the case in practice. Many people continue to deny others equal treatment, intentionally and not. Law Times offers a recent example of alleged systemic discrimination; the case Law Society of Upper Canada v. Selwyn Milan McSween raises the question of whether racism hinders black lawyers’ participation in big law firms in Ontario. I am sure this problem is not exclusive to big law firms or Ontario.

Selwyn McSween is a black lawyer found guilty of professional misconduct for “completely abdicating his professional responsibility” to an allegedly unscrupulous law clerk, in the opinion to the Law Society of Upper Canada. However, dissenting appeal panellist Clayton Ruby stated:

We cannot close our eyes to the disproportionate number of black lawyers whom we find before us faced with very grave professional misconduct allegations. …

The legal profession has made no concerted effort to rid itself of the racism inherent in the practice. The effects of racial inequality are real, not imagined, and we do the public no favour by refusing to acknowledge them.

Ruby suggests that the reason black lawyers face increase disciplinary charges is that minority groups have fewer and less meaningful articling opportunities to gain experience compared to “non-racialized” lawyers, law students and others in the profession.

The Law Times article refers briefly to a 1999 report on Racial Equality in the Canadian Legal Profession by the Canadian Bar Association, and I was curious.

According to the report:

Systemic racism or institutional racism is not about individual malice. It is about the way seemingly neutral values and practices can inadvertently serve to promote discrimination. It is about how the legacy of historic discrimination can continue to thrive in our midst.

The report’s authors clearly recognized that, at that time, law graduates from minority groups had poorer opportunities than non-minorities. Such graduates did not get the much-needed training and experience that their white counterparts received to succeed in the practice of law. I wonder what steps the Law Society of Upper Canada, the Department of Justice, the law schools and other decision makers have taken, given the findings of the report. Did they follow the strategic steps and recommendations? I guess not really, if we accept Ruby’s statement.

It would be interesting to know how the law society and the other groups received the report, and a follow-up report on the steps taken would have been very helpful!

As a lawyer who is also black (though that is not all I am, and I do not define myself by the colour of my skin, which by the way is brown not black), I see that systemic racism in law firms is unfortunately still a reality and not merely a perception. However, it is not only in law firms, but in many other industries and professions. I would also say that it is worse for black men than for black women.

This said, not all black lawyers are lacking experience in the practice of law, nor can we say all black lawyers do not obtain meaningful articling opportunities. Many lawyers who also find themselves referred to as blacks have succeeded in the legal profession. I can further add that some progress has been made to include more lawyers who are black in the legal profession; however, not enough.

In my view, these advancements are based on tolerance, not on totally removing the prejudiced policies, practices, perceptions, stigma, stereotypes and ideas about people who are black that continue to thrive in society, law schools and law firms. No matter the colour of our skin, it is not something we can change. It will always be with us and will be the first thing an interviewer will see, no matter whether we are the most experienced, the most qualified or the best candidate.

Tolerance has not been a final solution, but a precursor of continued racism.

I can also say these advancements are to meet diversity goals to show the public how multicultural a firm is, or to meet employment equity requirements, not solely with the intention of truly removing barriers that stop racism. Please note, having to state in an application form that you consider yourself part of a visible minority does not help, or reassure me that I will be considered so that you can meet your diversity goals or employment equity requirements.

At the same time, lawyers who also find themselves to be black have a responsibility to obtain the experience they need to become lawyers, especially if they have to become sole practitioners because law firms won’t hire them. Articling, although required, is not the only way to gain experience. Black lawyers’ the main concern should be getting their degree, learning as well as they can, practicing law and being the best lawyers they can be.

Not getting a good articling experience because you are black is a real problem that needs to be dealt with but not a good reason to become guilty of professional misconduct.

To gain knowledge and experience before I graduated, I volunteered in associations and legal centres. After I graduated, on top of articling, I sat in court most days watching how lawyers pleaded their cases. I talked to other lawyers and judges. Judges were the most willing to guide me. I read on the developments of legislation and case law at least three hours every day, and still do. I went to conferences, seminars, courses and workshops on the topics of law I wanted to specialize in. It takes work, but you need to look beyond the colour of your skin, even if others insist that you do.

But I still have to wonder, why would systemic discrimination still exist in law firms? Within organizations who are there to protect the public and the practice of law? Doesn’t the legal institution exist to uphold and apply the law without any prejudices?

So what do members of the Canadian Legal Profession and decision-makers intend to do about this?

I have updated my Legal Research and Writing website with a new page on resources for teaching legal research and writing.

Included on the page are links to:

• online training video tutorials,

• legal research and writing journals, newsletters and selected articles,

• legal research and writing associations and blogs, and

• general teaching resources for teaching legal research and writing.

I suspect my page may not be complete, so if I have missed something, I welcome comments and suggestions for other resources.

Like Darryl Mountain in today's Slaw.ca column, I have been thinking about law school lately. Or rather, I have been reminded about past thoughts on this topic. Whether law school should be changed or not is a current hot topic in the U.S. In addition to the New York Times article that Darryl points to, The National Law Journal has also just published the article What is Law School For, Anyway? by Karen Sloan about law schools not keeping up with what is needed in the profession.

One thing I believe the U.S. law school system has gotten right, however, has been allowing for parttime studies leading up to a law degree. It has allowed law degrees to be more available to students of a wider range of backgrounds, and allowed some to obtain the law degree to support work and previous education for other purposes besides practising or teaching the law.

It has long irked me that Canadian law schools are full-time study only (somebody please correct me if I am wrong). In the U.S., because law school is available on a parttime basis, roughly half of law librarians have both a law and a librarian degree (this is a guesstimate on my part, based on past discussions). In Canada the number is much smaller. I would be surprised if we could find more than 20 people across the country with both degrees.

Typically those with dual degrees have completed the law degree first, and then looked for alternatives to practice, thereafter seeking out library school. There are a few who have taken the dual degree in a program for that purpose. I am aware of dual degree programs at Dalhousie University and the University of Toronto; again, I would be interested if there are other dual degree programs in Canada. Even more rare, the odd librarian has gone back to school for law. But typically those people go into practice.

For a Canadian law librarian who would like to pursue legal studies, it means stopping work for 3 years, not only paying for law school but also potentially giving up an income for those years. It is not something that most would be willing to do. As a result, we have few with dual degrees.

Demand for law librarians in Canada, however, rises over time. Many law schools across the country, for example, require the dual degree for their library reference and management staff. Those with dual degrees are also desirable in some law firms for research lawyer and knowledge management positions. Supply is not up to the demand, so as a result those from outside Canada are found to fill the positions. This in itself is not a problem for individual positions, but what happens when we get to the point where most senior positions at our Canadian law school libraries are not staffed by Canadians? How does that affect service, instruction for law students, and the general philosophy of law school libraries?

Yes, you are correct if you pick this up as a personal rant. I have long felt that, had law school been available on a parttime basis in Canada as it is for my colleagues in the U.S., I would have gradually worked toward and completed a law degree to supplement my three other university degrees. I completed my library degree on a parttime basis while working fulltime in a law firm library. Starting a law degree 18 years ago would have been of great interest to me. I think about how different my career would have been. But there is no way I could have afforded to put my work life aside to complete a law degree fulltime.

If there is demand for the dual degrees, why is no one in the Canadian system doing anything to facilitate this? Why do law school libraries not hire those with library degrees who are willing to pursue a law degree while working? Is there another option?

Given my moot history in law school it's no surprise that I've been approached repeatedly by a number of different international moots now that I'm a lawyer. But I've never seen anything like this before.

A non-profit environmental law organization, West Coast Environmental Law (WCEL), is hosting the first-ever moot court held entirely on Twitter. Participants from different Canadian law schools will make their submissions in 140 characters or less. The intent of the exercise is to bring environmental law issues to a broader audience.

Yes, I've always dreamed about being a tweeting judge, and it seems that dream might come true.

The case will be a simulated fact pattern mirroring the West Moberly First Nations, obviously focusing on environmental law. Winners will receive a cash prize, their name on a plaque, and of course an incredible amount of exposure on Twitter.

You can follow WCEL on Twitter here, and the hash tag for the event, scheduled for February 2012, is #twtmoot. This will certainly be worth watching this exercise in pedagogue, social media, activism and engagement .

I'll have more information related to sponsorship and participation on my personal site here.

Looming right around the corner is that magical time of year, we all get more busy, tensions rise and people run around in oddly coloured clothing…. of course I'm talking about Law School Exam Time. Personally, I do not think that CERN needs to go on trying to break the speed of light because this semester seems to have already done so, which brings us to exam time. Back in September I posted, what I hoped were, a few nuggets about being in law school. What follows are a few more with regards to preparing for and executing exam writing. I did not address this post to the 2Ls and 3Ls because I figure that they have already figured out what works for them and what does not but this advice is not just for 1Ls

I'm keeping many of the same headings from the September post because most of that advice relates to the exam writing advice:

Obviously, you can't do much about this if you haven't gone all semester, but hopefully you did, and took decent notes. If you missed a couple find a classmate who hopefully takes good notes and ply them with baked goods in the hopes that they will share. Use your class notes to help with preparing your own CANS (below).

Again, hopefully you have done this. If not you have about a week to get caught up. If you are very far behind, skimming is a fine art that you have hopefully already nurtured as a skill set through the first 3 months of law school. Remember, first and last sentence of a paragraph. You probably don't have a lot of time to do this right now, but the Science of Word Recognition is quite interesting.

I'm going to try and not revisit what I wrote before, so all I will say is make sure that whatever CANs you use are liberally sprinkled with content that has been generated by you.

The hysteria mentioned previously reaches its zenith right about…….now. Do not succumb to it, which I acknowledge is sometimes harder than it sounds. If you need to avoid the law school whilst studying then find another good study spot. Don't let whatever the talk is, get to you, and don't engage in or even try to listen to the
conversations that take place immediately preceding or post exam.

To quote, "…is the decrease in the marginal (per-unit) output of a production process as the amount of a single factor of production is increased, while the amounts of all other factors of production stay constant." In exam writing terms this means to get the amount of rest you need in order to be alert and have a properly functioning mind while writing. If you need 8 hours of sleep to feel refreshed, the value you might gain from studying until 3am is offset by the sluggishness brought on by only getting 5 hours of sleep. Or quite simply, at a certain point it no longer pays to keep on studying, get some sleep and focus on what you know, the return you get on studying until 3am is going to be greatly diminished.

The enemy of studying; but to be honest, your mind needs to have short breaks every so often. Around here there is usually a dominant procrastination theme for an exam period, recent ones have included: Mafia Wars, Assassins or placing themed post-it notes on a world map. I'm always interested to see what the exam period will bring.

Good Luck to all who are writing, I'll see you on the other side!

A recent working paper by Mark K. Osbeck of the University of Michigan Law School, proposes a framework for understanding, and teaching, good legal writing.

Available via SSRN, What is "Good Legal Writing" and Why Does it Matter?, the paper provides an overview of the major reports and other documents that have called for increased attention in US law schools to practical "lawyering" skills, starting with the MacCrate Report of 1992. It then provides a conceptual framework for defining good legal writing, and a detailed discussion of its various elements:

[The paper] argues that legal readers judge a document to be well-written if the writing helps them make the decisions they need to make in the course of their professional duties. The article then provides an analysis of the fundamental qualities that enable legal writing to do this, concluding that there are three such qualities: clarity, conciseness, and the ability to appropriately engage the reader. The article explains why each of these qualities is essential to good legal writing, and it examines the tools good writers use to make their writing clear, concise, and engaging. Lastly, the article examines what it is that distinguishes the very best writing in the field, arguing that great legal writing is not just writing that is especially clear, concise, and engaging, but is instead writing characterized by a separate quality, elegance, that is aesthetic in nature. (abstract, p.2)

I like the emphasis on meeting the purposes of the readers of the document, because, though it may be a somewhat narrow, even idealized, view of the purposes of legal writing, it is at least a starting place that recognizes the connection between legal writing and legal reading. The development of expert legal writing and legal reading skills go hand in hand, as the writer summarizes:

[Writers] become proficient at writing primarily by reading the works of good writers and by practicing their own writing. Focusing students on the fundamental goals of legal writing (i.e., clarity, conciseness, and engagement) while at the same time exposing them to examples of excellent writing allows students to analyze for themselves the tools masters of the craft employ to achieve these fundamental goals.(p. 66)

I was alerted to this article by subscribing to SSRN's Law & Rhetoric eJournal, available to subscribers.

Today's Globe and Mail features an articling discussing what is being called a "crisis" in articling positions,

Some blame law firms, accusing them of reducing their hiring in the face of economic uncertainty. But according to Law Society statistics, there has also been a steady increase in the number of law graduates, as law schools have increased their enrolments. The number of law students successfully landing articling jobs has increased each year since 2007, but it has not kept pace with demand.

The article features interviews with Meagan Williams, a colleague of mine from UWO Law (and occasional law blogger), Tom Conway, head of the Law Society task force on articling, Dean Lorne Sossin of Osgoode Hall, Deborah Glatter of Cassels Brock & Blackwell LLP, and Chris Axworthy, the new Dean of the Thompson Rivers law school.

You can see my previous piece on articling here.

We need to create an Ontario Legal Corps composed of lawyers and articling students to address the access to justice crisis in this province and we need to do it now. An Ontario Legal Corps will also go a long way to addressing the current deficit in available articling positions.

The articling crisis in Ontario is a supply-side program. It deals with the issue of the scarcity of supply of articling positions. As many judges and now the Governor General have reminded us, we have an Access to Justice crisis which is a demand side problem. The demand for legal services far outstrips the available supply as the Ontario Civil Legal Needs Project revealed.

Why not come up with solutions that attempt to match the two problems?

Clayton Ruby recently mooted the creative suggestion of paying a legal aid “articling student bonus” for legal aid work done by articling students. This is a great idea except that the prospect of any significant infusion of legal aid dollars coming from either level of government in the near future is remote. We need to keep working on governments but that is a long term strategy. In the short term, government is simply not the answer.

If we are to address the twin crises of articling and access to justice we must do so on our own. And it is in our collective interest as a profession to do so because as the Governor General warned us in August, if we fail to meet our obligations under the social contract “Society will change the social contract, and redefine professionalism for us. Regulation and change will be forced upon us—quite possibly in forms which diminish or remove our self-regulatory privilege.”

An Ontario Legal Corps – modeled along President John F. Kennedy’s Peace Corps - would provide legal services by lawyers and articling students to underserviced communities across Ontario. The idea of articling students providing legal services may be new to Ontario but it has recently been accepted by the Law Society of British Columbia.

It seems that lawyers in Ontario support articling in their rhetoric but not in their actions. In 2008, the Law Society of Upper Canada’s Licensing and Accreditation Task Force reported that that lawyers overwhelmingly wanted to retain articling. It also reported that there were only 1171 approved articling principals out of approximately 31,000 lawyers in private practice, government and corporate practice and other employment available to serve as articling principals. That is less than a 4% participation rate. The rest of the profession – including myself – is freeloading on the work of that 4% who are shouldering the burden of training the next generation of lawyers. If we believe in the need for practical training for new lawyers, we should all share in this responsibility.

Thus, out of necessity, the funding for an Ontario Legal Corps would come mostly from us, from lawyers. Under this proposal, each lawyer in Ontario would pay a $200 Access to Justice levy. With 40,000 lawyers, this will create 200 fully-funded Access to Justice Articling positions paying annual salaries of $40,000. In short, my idea is 200 articling positions for $200 per lawyer in Ontario. Or simply “200 for 200”. I think this is a fair price to pay to promote access to justice, train the next generation of lawyers and protect self-regulation.

The University of Ottawa proposed a similar idea in its submissions to the LSUC’s 2008 Licensing and Accreditation Taskforce as one of its nine suggestions that it made to that Task Force. It proposed instituting a “lawyer levy” that the LSUC would impose on the 30,000 lawyers who do not employ articling students in any given year contributed $100 each year, the LSUC could provide two hundred articling subsidies in the amount of $15,000 in any given year. Subsidies could be focused on both geographical and cultural areas that are currently underrepresented by lawyers. That suggestion was not given serious consideration at the time. It should be now.

But that 2008 proposal did not go far enough. The access to justice crisis worsens and we are back looking at articling only three years later because we need bold solutions. An Ontario Legal Corps is worth considering.

Ontario has the unique position of having more applicants for articling positions than available positions. A panel at the Second Annual Conference Association for Canadian Clinical Legal Education discussed the future of articling in Ontario on September 24, 2011 at Osgoode Hall Law School.

Tom Conway of the Law Society of Upper Canada Task Force on Articling shared some of his personal views on the subject. He indicated there were 1,700 people who registered for articling in 2010-2011, and the situation is expected to get worse with UofO expanding its common law section, and the new law schools recently launched. The University of Montreal has also applied to expand their common law program, which may result in even further increases of law students.

The vast majority of articling positions are in the Toronto area (55%), and the majority of those positions are with large firms. Most practitioners in the province though are sole practitioners or in firms with less than 5 lawyers. For most articling students in the province the articling experience is a big firm Toronto experience. In 2008, the LSUC recommendations were overwhelming in favour of retaining articling as part of the licensing process, and focused on increasing the number of articling positions. They streamlined the process for articling principals, provided an articling registry, and conducted an articling survey. But despite all of this, not a single additional articling position was created.

André Bacchus, Director of Professional Development, Heenan Blaikie LLP, noted that a number of small practitioners are dying to have an articling student, but the applicants are reluctant to relocate to remote or rural locations where these practices are located.

Kim Brooks, Dean, Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University, indicated that market conditions are poor in society, generally. Interpreting articling data should be done with careful consideration of the unemployment rates outside of law, and that many individuals without articling positions will still have meaningful contributions to society in other capacities with their legal education.

Lorne Sossin, Dean, Osgoode Hall Law School, stated that the law society has no ability to actually determine the type of training that occurs during articling. The wide variety of types of articling positions defies the ability to qualitatively assess whether articling is actually achieving its goals. There are real skills that are required for practice, which may or not be obtained through articling.

Once again Rich McCue has published the results of his annual survey of incoming law students at the University of Victoria. His executive summary of the results is as follows:

• 84% of incoming law students own “Smart Phones” that can browse the internet (up dramatically from 50% last year), with 42% of the total being iPhones, 13% Android and 27% Blackberry’s.
• 19% of students own tablet devices or ebook readers.
• 98% of students own laptops, and 16% own both a laptop and a desktop computer.
• 50% of student laptops are Mac’s, up from 44% last year.
• The average laptop price stayed basically the same as last year at $1,186, which is down from $1400 in 2007, and from $2,100 in 2004.
• The students’ average typing speed was was 60 wpm.
• 72% of all students bring their laptops to school almost every day.
• 55% of students use Gmail as their primary email account (up from 49% last year), 9% use UVic email and 22% Hotmail.
• 60% of students identified MS Word as their favorite tool for collaborative document editing (down from 67%). 30% favor Google Docs (up from 27%) and 2% OpenOffice.
• 58% of students report backing up their primary computer on a regular basis. 60% of those backing up do so to an external hard drive and 25% to a cloud storage solution.
• 97% of students use Facebook (up from 91%) and 92% (up from 80%) would like to see law school events and activities published on Facebook as well as through the online faculty calendar.

None of this surprises me, except perhaps the number of students using Google Docs, which is higher than I would have supposed. And while I'm glad to see that most students are backing up their computers, I wonder if I believe them. That 50% of their laptops are Macs suggests that law firms had better get ready — readier than they are, certainly — to accommodate Apple's operating system.

It would be great to see other law schools imitating Rich in this and generating some data as to what the profession might expect as regards technological devices and expectations.

Orientation week is drawing to a close. 2L and 3L classes have begun with 1L to begin on Monday. To all 1Ls here are my pieces of advice. I know that not all who have experienced law school will agree with these and that's fine, I hope that Slawyers will contribute their pieces of advice in the comments. Here are mine:

• Go to Class

I know this seems self-explanatory and I also know that one of the guilty pleasures of being a student is the occasional skipped class, so if you are going to skip classes be very judicious in choosing those few occasions. Your profs don't appreciate the missed classes and if shows when you write an exam if you have missed substantial time. Some believe you can skip class and rely on CANS (see below) that might get you through but you won't excel and you won't really know what you are talking about, and it shows, on exams and when you go out to work.

• Keep up on the Readings

The corollary to the first item; this also seems self-explanatory; however, (and I hope you are already aware of this) there is a lot of reading in Law School, plan for it, allocate substantial amounts of time for it and get on top of it early because it is difficult to catch up once you fall behind. The semester is relatively short and if you fall behind you are going to find yourself three weeks out from exams with a substantial amount of reading undone and trying to prepare for exams ill-equipped (even if you have good CANS) and going into exams with incomplete knowledge. Also, going to class without having done the readings shows. Your profs are pretty clever and whether or not they call you on it, they have a good idea.

• CANS

Ahh CANS or – Condensed Annotated Notes I would never be so bold as to suggest you ignore the grey market for CANS, even though I believe that your best CANS are ones you create yourself. Those legendary CANS that are floating around the law school are likely several years old and there are likely at least one or two cases which have been superseded or overturned. SO what I will suggest is that you take the CANS and update them yourself, use that legendary copy as a template. Furthermore, you stand a better chance at understanding your own work than that of someone else.

• Don't listen to your classmates

I'm not suggesting that your classmates are dumb or malevolent, this simply means don't let talk affect you. As in: "I read xx number of pages" or "Did you study xxxx" or the pre and post exam talk (albeit this one is difficult to avoid), whether it is intended or not this type of talk psyches a lot of people; you can only take care of yourself don't let what others say they are doing, affect you. I'm not saying avoid your classmates, you will make friendships in law school that last a lifetime. And in fact a small group of friends whom you trust and rely on can be extremely helpful. I'm simply saying that there is a wave of hysteria that can pass through a law school and catch many people in the wake. It is the type of talk referred to above that fuels the wave, don't let it affect you.

• (At the Risk of self aggrandizement) Get to know your friendly neighbourhood law librarian

While we can't do whatever a spider can; action is our reward. Or more concisely, stopping short of writing your exams or doing your studying for you, we can make your life a lot easier. We know the databases that are available whether that be case-law, legislation, citation managers, legal literature indexes or full-text, blogs, wikis you name it, that is our stock in trade. Furthermore, and perhaps more significantly we know our way around the law school and the university you are attending- what support is offered, good places to study, tips, talks and what we like to call our ninja tricks. We also know legal citation.

Above all, enjoy yourself! it is a lot of work but if you wanted to go to law school you should find most of the work interesting. You may feel that you have entered a different dimension, but the three years goes by in a relatively short time and when it is over you will look back on student life fondly. And to finish with the thoughts of local artist Matt Mays "You gotta move your mind; if you wanna feel welcome; around here".

Attention: what follows is not me, my head shot to the left is not representative of the following paragraphs. Over the summer we have had a library school intern working in multiple capacities at the Sir James Dunn Law Library as our student reference assistant. During this time Amanda (Andie) Bulman has become a fan of Slaw and I thought that as the summer is drawing to a close I thought I would give her a chance to craft a post for Slaw on what her experience has been like over the past several months. I gave her a free rein to write what she desired, with a few editorial suggestions before I posted the text, and what follows are her thoughts on law, legal research and legal librarianship in an academic setting.

Lesson #1. Don’t screw up the job interview

I was not the first choice for the summer reference internship at the Sir James Dunn Law Library. I kept my beige trench coat on throughout the interview (a pen had exploded on my sweater minutes before the interview was scheduled to start) and nervously made some jokes about a province some of the interviewers were from. These were the first lessons. Wear a blazer. Keep the jokes to a minimum. Be professional in the job interview.

Lesson #2. Sometimes “The Answer” does not exist.

In June slews of undergraduates were taking a business law course and came to the library on a semi-regular basis. They frequently requested my help in searching for case law or legislation that had very specific criteria and I frequently went home feeling frustrated by my inability to find “the answer”. I eventually realized that it is unlikely that “the answer” would be found in a single document. Legal research is a time consuming process and well-crafted legal arguments are usually constructed from a variety of resources. The answer is a myth. Legal research rarely works that way.

Lesson #3. Reference librarians are trained in the art and science of answering questions. Reference librarians are not lawyers. Don’t play one on TV!

The questions that people ask in a law library differ significantly from the questions that get asked at other academic libraries. The questions can be complicated and weighty and often quite depressing. Your heartstrings will be tugged. Show restraint. Provide instruction and show patrons how to use the available resources. Do not get involved. Do not provide legal advice!

Lesson #4. Law libraries attract a weird and wide variety of patrons. Be prepared to help everyone.

I should qualify this by stating that I do receive the normal everyday questions about citations and databases. However, many questions seem to border on the absurd. Fridays are especially rough days at the reference desk. The research students have decided to take the day off, the faculty have made tracks for their summer homes, and the residents of Arkham have come to play.

I’ve met: a gentleman who does not “believe or trust computers”, several individuals who sue people for a living, and a host of conspiracy theorists attempting to prove that the Federal Income Tax Act is illegal. Law librarianship is a service profession. The law library is here to serve students and faculty, but we are also available to help anyone who wants to learn to navigate our resources. I’ve helped students with Quicklaw, assisted professors in their search for obscure newspaper articles, and have tracked down various amendments to the Income Tax Act for several very enthusiastic conspiracy theorists. The final and most important lesson has three parts: treat everyone with respect, teach everyone to use the library, and know when and how to exit a conversation that’s taken a turn for the weird.

Lesson #5. I want to be a legal librarian or an academic librarian. Please give me a job.

The most important thing that I have learned is that I want to work in this field. Before accepting this position, I only had a vague sense of what being a legal reference librarian entailed. I imagined that the reference librarians at the Sir James Dunn Law Library mainly created library guides and sat behind the information desk looking knowledgeable. The reality is very different. Besides working the reference desk the librarians create information guides for library users, they collaborate on policies and procedures, test drive new technology, committee work, present at conferences, collaborate with faculty on research, conduct their own research, catalog the collection, shelf read, work in acquisitions, and a host of other things. Their schedules are varied and interesting and their days rarely seem routine. Most importantly, the legal librarians here have an opportunity to teach research skills to students in a classroom setting . That’s the aspect of this career that seems most interesting. Having the ability, time, and opportunity to teach research skills would be amazing.

It has been a long while since we mentioned the Innovaction Awards. The 2011 winners were recently announced, and a Canadian group are among the winners:

Berwin Leighton Paisner, LLP (BLP) was selected for their Lawyers On Demand (LOD) initiative which began in 2007 after BLP observed two important issues affecting the UK legal market: (1) legal services clients want to stretch their budgets further and (2) many lawyers are looking for greater flexibility and autonomy in their work. BLP created LOD to address these issues. LOD challenged the traditional models of legal service delivery and brought talented freelance lawyers to work directly with clients. LOD lawyers work at the client office or their home office but are nevertheless vetted and supported by BLP know-how resources, the LOD service unique in the market. LOD began as a pilot in 2007 with eight lawyers. Since then, it has increased ten-fold in size and gained a fantastic list of clients.

The University of Toronto Faculty of Law received an InnovAction Award for its Internationally Trained Lawyers Program (ITLP). When immigrating to Canada, one of the biggest challenges internationally-trained lawyers (ITL) face is the lack of access to opportunities to receive practical, hands-on experience in the Canadian legal environment, particularly during the lengthy accreditation and licensing process. In recognizing the limited opportunities for ITLs, the University of Toronto's Faculty of Law created a bridging program for ITLs who wish to practice in Ontario. The ITLP is a comprehensive 10-month program to help participants obtain their license and secure full-time professional employment. The program includes intensive academic, cultural fluency and career development classroom sessions, design to support international lawyers.

The University of Miami School of Law in partnership with five other law schools was selected for theirLawWithoutWalls initiative. LawWithoutWalls is a part-virtual, collaborative academic model that unites students, faculty, practitioners, and entrepreneurs from around the world to innovate legal education and practice. It’s designed to help those engaged in the education and practice of law to embrace the impact of our changing world. LawWithoutWalls exemplifies what 21^st century education can be. Students are not educated on-line in the same old way. Instead, technology is utilized to create an entirely new educational experience, a platform for interdisciplinary interchange and community.

Check out the video for LawWithoutWalls (for video from Lawyers On Demand, you will have to visit their website):

LawWithoutWalls from LawWithoutWalls on Vimeo.

The papers recently carried the news of the death of Paul-André Crépeau, C.C., O.Q., c.r., LL.D., D.h.c., m.s.r.c., who I would argue was the most influential law reformer in Canadian legal history.

From the initial invitation in 1965 from Jean Lesage's Justice Minister Claude Wagner to take over the Office de Révision du code civil, originally set up during the Duplessis years with Thibaudeau Rinfret and André Nadeau, Crépeau's vision and his life work was la révision du Code civil, and under his leadership the Office focused on the daunting task of updating the general provisions of a century-old Code. The Office de Révision du code civil was originally set up during the Duplessis years with Thibaudeau Rinfret and André Nadeau, but only really blossomed with Crépeau.

Crépeau's background was unusual for someone who was so closely identified with the civil law tradition. He was born in rural Saskatchewan, and obtained his Licence in Philosophy at the University of Ottawa (1947), followed by a B.C.L. at the Université de Montréal (1950). He won a Rhodes Scholarship that took him to study common law and comparative law at the University of Oxford and a Bachelor of Civil Law (1952) and a doctorate at the Université de Paris (1955). He began his career as an assistant professor at the Université de Montréal Faculty of Law (1955-1959), and soon after joined the McGill University Faculty of Law (1959-1994), and after that a doctorate in classical civil law from the Université de Paris. He had six earned degrees and seven honorary doctorates, and was honoured with a Festschrift on his retirement. He was justly honoured in Ottawa and Québec

In 1965, Professor Crépeau was entrusted by the Québec government to reform the Civil Code. As the president of the Civil Code Revision Office, he aspired to create a work that would serve as a “collective reflection on the very foundations of private law institutions”. In 1978, this work culminated as a presentation to the National Assembly of the Draft Code Civil, accompanied by explanatory Commentaries. It served as the framework for the project (bill) which eventually became the new Civil Code of Québec, adopted in 1991 and came into force on 1 January 1994.

The story of the new Code is one that is known to too few Canadian lawyers – a helpful interview can be found here. The Justice Minister at the time the new Code was implemented, Gil Rémillard, was justly proud of the project, but he was at most the sage homme – and Crépeau and his team, the ones who did the intense intellectual study and design, that resulted in today's Code.

Radio Canada's obituary is here, and the Law Faculty's here.

He dedicated his professional life to studying and developing Canadian civil law from a comparative law perspective as well as to promoting the French-inspired civilian tradition, in Canada as well as internationally. With a hat tip to my colleague – and occasional blogger – Alejandro Manevich, here is a cartoon from the Barreau's Journal this month, which illustrates the point.

After his work on the Code, he dedicated his work to the Centre de recherche en droit privé et comparé du Québec, which has a remarkable set of publications.

Peut-il reposer en paix.

When you teach at law school, as I have, you become familiar with a variety of reasons as to why students choose to study law—perhaps there's a history of lawyers in the family; or their parents want them to do something, anything professional; or they want to right wrongs, get that BMW, enter politics, point damning fingers at witnesses… Even with those students who wound up in law school with apparently only a shrug for a reason, some explanation eventually surfaced.

Now there is a novel explanation—at least for a small portion of the student body. Two recent studies have explored the possibility that a student's name might make the difference. Ernest Abel ("Influence of Names on Career Choices in Medicine," Names Vol. 58 No. 2, June, 2010, 65–74—abstract only free online) has found that thanks to "implicit egotism" we may be motivated unconsciously to prefer career choices that remind us of our names. Thus, if your name is Doctor or includes "doc" or "med", you're more likely to become a doctor than a lawyer; and if your name is Law or starts with that syllable or "leg" or "att", for example, the reverse is the case: you may feel drawn to law school.

Another study done a few years earlier ("Why Susie Sells Seashells by the Seashore: Implicit Egotism and Major Life Decisions," Pelham et al., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2002, Vol. 82, No. 4, 469–487) came to similar conclusions. 

One is… sceptical. I have to say that there's no possibility that my name influenced me to pick law; I learned in high school biology class that it sounded unhappily close to "silaged fodder," and yet I did not feel a pull towards farming. But things might be different for you. Or you. So I thought I'd experiment just a little. Now, I've no ability to run a proper study here, lacking nearly all statistical knowledge as well as the time it would take to do a proper job. But I decided that a down-and-dirty comparison might be fun, so I consulted the directory of the Law Society of Upper Canada and, for comparison, the Directory of Public Accounting Licensees, looking to see whether or not "law" names formed roughly similar proportions of each group. (Because the Law Society database required me to enter a city, I chose the largest, Toronto.)

As you see from the table below, the results are at odds with the outcomes of the Abel and Pelham studies. Indeed, having "law" within your name seems to incline you to accounting. Of course, it could be that we here in Canada or, indeed, here in Toronto, are somehow perverse — or just different from our American sibs, lacking, perhaps, that "implicit egotism" that would have, well, made me into a farmer.

A short while ago the first issue of the UC Irvine Law Review became available via the UC Irvine website. Given the school’s initial growing pains it is welcome to see this first issue. Many SLAW readers may remember the political controversy involving the initial offer, withdrawal of offer, and rehiring of leading US constitutional law scholar (and frequent critic of the Bush administration) Erwin Chemerinsky as the school’s Founding Dean. Dean Chemerinsky addresses the controversy in the journal’s opening article on the school’s founding and his vision for a new law school. Of interest to SLAWers is that he saw the hiring of a librarian - my colleague Beatrice Tice, formerly of the Bora Laskin Law Library – as an important part of building a new law school.

Beatrice has an excellent article in the inaugural issue: “The Academic Law Library in the 21st Century: Still the Heart of the Law School”. The title is a reference to Harvard president Charles Eliot’s descriprion of Harvard’s law library as “the heart of the school” in his 1872-73 Annual Report. Beatrice gives us an excellent overview of the role and perceptions of the law school library from the 18th century to the present. I’m a bit embarrassed to say that a lot of the very interesting history that Beatrice recounts was new to me.

Beatrice concludes with a discussion of why the academic law library is still relevant in the twenty first century. There has been a lot of recent discussion among and between librarians on this topic. Here Beatrice is addressing non-librarians and provides a good summary of some of the strengths of the academic library– including the increased need for the library’s “information facilitation” function in a hybrid digital and print environment (what John Palfrey calls “digital plus”), and the observation that “The indefinable ambience of the law library as an environment for work of great consequence—as the ‘laboratory of the law school’—is felt and understood by those who use the library, even in the information age.”

One of the saddest chapters of Bill Kaplan's excellent biography Canadian Maverick – the Life and Times of Ivan C. Rand, is his account of Justice Rand's post SCC appointment as the founding Dean of the University of Western Ontario's Law School. Rand didn't fit, was remote from students, and was ill at ease and isolated. {For further references see Omar's post and Jamie Cameron's review.]

A different challenge awaits the former chairman and chief executive officer of McCarthy Tétrault LLP., Iain Scott who will be moving to take over the deanship of Western in September. This is a time of transition for Canadian legal education in which many of the founding myths of the profession are up for re-examination by a generation for whom Caesar Wright is scarcely a footnote. The balance between academic and professional emphasis in legal education is ripe for re-examination thirty years after Harry Arthur's seminal Law and Learning Report. The future of legal services in a very changing marketplace. Shifts in models of lawyering. The unmet legal needs of millions. The linkages between business schools and law schools. The challenges and opportunities offered by new technologies.

I worked together with Iain on the CBA Conflicts Task Force and he's an impressive, intelligent, shrewd and tough lawyer, who has a splendid grasp of the bigger picture.

Western is fortunate to have him. It'll be interesting to see what happens at UWO over the next few years.

♬ I've seen the bridge and the bridge is long
And they built it high and they built it strong
Strong enough to hold the weight of time
Long enough to leave some of us behind…♬

Lyrics by Bernie Taupin, music composed and recorded by Sir Elton John.

SFU Convocation

Simon Fraser University's Masters of Arts in Applied Legal Studies has received a 2011 Award of Excellence from the Canadian Association for University Continuing Education.

The prestigious award was presented at the CAUCE national conference recently held in Toronto to John Whatley, the CODE program director. Dr. Whately received the award on behalf of SFU’s School of Criminology, Centre for Online and Distance Education (CODE) and, in particular, all the people responsible for the design, implementation and continuing delivery of the program.

The SFU's CODE program uses software called "eLive":

eLive is a communication tool that offers synchronous (real-time) audio, video, text and graphical connection with your tutor-marker and classmates. Types messages to one another, speak to one another over the computer, and draw pictures—all in real time—to communicate ideas and images.

The Elluminate Live software (commonly known as eLive at SFU) is an online synchronous audio visual platform. It allows for students – located anywhere in the world – to sign onto the web site and participate in the class using the interactive features of the software. The students can present a powerpoint, take over control of the class and show their desktop (and whatever is there). They can chat, raise their hands and basically interact with each other as if they were all in the same physical room.

Kristy Martin, who completed the program in 2011, says that the innovative delivery of the program was essential: “My favourite experience in this program was e-live, which provided a more interactive learning opportunity without the need for in class attendance. That allowed those of us who do not live in Vancouver an opportunity to have lectures from our professors and to interact with our fellow students.”

eLive software is truly the 'next generation' in university education. Having used the software (and others like it), I can testify that it is truly amazing to be fully participating in the class from your easy chair with your laptop on your lap, without having to fight traffic, find parking or go through any of the typical time-gobbling activities that are otherwise necessary to be in the same classroom at the same time. The software fully enables the type of high-quality engagement among the attendees that is necessary for a university (and in fact, Masters-level) class.

Congratulations to the Dean: Dr. Robert Gordon, Dr. John Whately and the rest of the team for 'elluminating' how the eLive software combined with the web can build a bridge and bring people together for world-class results.

A few of us here at Slaw have been giving testimonials to our tablet experiences and I am going to follow the trend today, I am very early in my iPad relationship, you could even call me a Pad-awan, if you will. I am currently using the iPad 2 as a test project to try and determine the applicability of the iPad as tool in legal education. In this post I'm going to try to focus on specific apps and why I use them and attempt not to reiterate the specifics of previous posts on this topic. I expect that some of my uses may differ from some readers as I work within an academic institution but I'm sure that some uses cross over. This is also a call for suggestions for apps and uses.

With that background, it is a great tool for "keeping in touch" with the office and work items (half-hearted "yay"); not the hard core nose-to-the-grindstone work but great for keeping tabs on what is going on whilst you are away. I expect the nose-to-the-grindstone stuff will become better with the keyboard. It is also a great communication device, especially personal communications, Skype, Facetime, you name it. It is a great social media tool; on the iPad it is easy to quickly survey the social media landscape, make your contribution and move on. I haven't tried the dictation app yet, but have downloaded one (Dragon Dictation) and intend on giving it a go. Several years ago I went to an electronic daytimer and found the experience unsatisfactory and moved back to the conventional print daytimer (my guess is that I am in the minority on this), I'm now giving an e-daytimer another go on the iPad; however, it is too early to report back. The iPad is also a great tool for news and current events but most of you are aware of this and have seen it discussed elsewhere.

I use both Safari and Mini-Opera web browsers and am using this as a public call for Firefox to get in the game in a substantial way. Both Safari and Mini-Opera have different issues with handling things such as java and some course content software used at this institution but between the two of them most of the functionality I want is there, but there is room for improvement. In my line of work a PDF reader is essential, as I'm sure it is in many lines of work, where I find it especially useful is for the multitude of committees one finds themselves on at a university. Agendas, minutes, whatever files are being examined in PDF are great for use on the iPad. I think I can safely say that this is the first time since the proclamations of the paperless office began (30-40 years ago?) that I can honestly say I'm using something that consistently cuts down on the amount of paper I handle. I am currently using several apps to determine which suits me best, GoodReader, PDFReader and even iBooks and there are more out there. The more annotating features these apps have the better. On the subject of iBooks, this is my first real foray into a personal ebook reader. I rather like the experience in many respects but there are also limitations to it. The tablet is not as convenient to hold and read for a prolonged period of time and not as convenient on a dock at the cottage. For academic study, annotating features in ebooks are valued, but differs from tabs and highlighting not in a better-or-worse type of way but in how these features affect your workflow. That and legal publishers have been slow to move legal books to ebooks (before you make comments I said "slow" to do it rather than "not" doing it). In many respects I believe that comparing ebooks and print remains an apple and orange type comparison, they are different experiences each with their own merit and demerits, similarly I don't think print is going to disappear quite yet. Lose market share? Absolutely and quite dramatically, but disappear altogether? Not yet. Will print remain relevant? For the short to medium term, yes.

I applaud the existence of the Quicklaw app, discussed here previously but my thoughts are similar to Ted's. WestlawNext is an app, unfortunately my academic password doesn't work on this app. Martindale-Hubbell and Lawyers.com have apps, here I don't have a quibble with the functionality of the app but the content, there seem to be a paucity of information for Canadian lawyers and firms. While I readily acknowledge that the iPad is not a device one should be using for hardcore word processing, I still want to do word processing, say in those committee meetings, and I've yet to find an app that satisfies my humble word processing wants, suggestions are welcomed both for this purpose or any other that works for you.

The time is ripe for the creation of an online repository and clearinghouse for Canadian legal scholarship in digital form. There are perhaps 70 Canadian journals publishing articles on or immediately relevant to law, making for a manageable supply of material. And the software and associated technology is readily available for free or at a very low cost. Of course, the labour necessary to construct and manage such a resource is not free, and may be less than readily available; but it seems to me that the major obstacle at the moment is simply the lack of will. Someone — some institution — needs to "pull the trigger" to launch the thing.

And launching would entail beginning the task of persuading authors and journals to submit material to the repository or, at least, to licence the use of a copy obtained otherwise. I don't mean to imply that this task would be easy. But I believe it could be accomplished. The willingness of authors now to publish drafts or "preprints" via the Social Science Research Network suggests that there is an appetite to make their work available in a professional setting.

It's hard to judge exactly how much of Canadian legal scholarly output is online at the Legal Scholarship Network within SSRN. Most is submitted by authors from the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto and Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, two of the top contributors among non-US law schools. There are, however, ten Canadian law schools among the top 100 non-US law school contributors. (Top contributing law schools are divided into "US law schools" and "International law schools"; "foreign" is what's meant, or, perhaps "non-US".) But so far as I can see, there are no means of isolating articles by national origin or principal jurisdictional focus from the pool of 100,000 LSN items.

While the availability of some Canadian research in the LSN is an unalloyed good, a repository such as the one I'm advocating would have a broader purpose than that served by the Scholarship Networks. It would aim to develop a catalogued, rationalized and searchable collection, creating the sort of metadata likely to prove useful in the foreseeable, technological future. And, of course, the articles along with their metadata would be made freely available online for use by anyone, according to an appropriate license. Once the repository had current publications under sufficient control, there could be a program to bring into the repository material from the past, akin to that pursued by CanLII with respect to older judgments.

It might be that a project such as this would work best as a cooperative venture among a number of law schools. This would help to spread the cost, of course, and to encourage adoption by scholars in the contributing institutions. Too, it would seem a project likely to appeal to various funding sources — law foundations, governmental research councils and the like.

But these are details, capable of being worked out by someone — some institution — willing to take the plunge.

A message on the American Law Libraries – Private Law Libraries SIS Listserv has alerted me to: (i) A new blog by Law Librarian Jean O'Grady called Dewey B Strategic which has the subtitle of "Risk, value, strategy, libraries, knowledge and the legal profession," and (ii) a recent intriguing post on this new blog called The Myth and the Madness of Cost Effective Lexis and Westlaw Research Training that raises the challenge (if not impossibility) of trying to teach "cost-effective searching" on Westlaw or Lexis to students or associates given the complexity of how these products are priced. Some examples of the points being made from the post:

Handing an associate a Lexis or Westlaw password and asking them to be “cost effective,” is like handing someone a credit card and sending them into a store in which none of the merchandise is priced and then berating them when the bill comes in exceeding your budget. No consumer affairs department would allow a retailer to perpetrate this kind of thing on the public. How is it that almost every law firm in the US has put up with this for the past 3 decades?

_________________

The obsession with being “cost effective” distracts the associate from focusing on the real goal — finding the right answer. Here comes the brain theory. Effective legal research requires deep focus and concentration yet… “the myth of cost effective research” requires an associate to engage half of their attention on a collateral and competing analysis of factors which have nothing to do with the substance of the law. (Am I in hourly or transactional mode? Is this content included or excluded? Should I print or read online? Should I execute a new search or will that cost too much? Have I selected the cheapest file? Is it cheaper to print by the line or print a page or print a document or should I email the results to myself?)

Yesterday I was catching up on some of my television viewing and happened to watch Fareed Zakaria GPS on CNN, whose guest was author and New Yorker columnist Malcolm Gladwell. Among other topics, they discussed the legitimacy of US college rankings. Gladwell maintained that, while not all rankings are bad, summarizing such complex analysis, and putting completely different organizations side-by-side in a simple ranking list oversimplified the information at hand.

Gladwell went on to talk about the Law School Ranking Game, a tool created by Jeffrey E. Stake at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law. The introduction to the Law School Ranking Game explains:

What kind of game is this? You tell us.

We Americans love rankings. The creators of some rankings play to win your money. Law schools play ranking games to win your attendance.

The Ranking Game lets you make your own rankings of law schools based on your preferences.

How do you win

By learning how much play to give rankings in the "choosing a law school" game—a game of High Stakes, indeed.

I gave the Law School Ranking Game a whirl. I found that it did not work with all the browsers on my machine (not on Firefox or Chrome) which may have had something to do with the version of Java enabled. The third attempt was a charm (Safari on my Macbook). It popped open a little spreadsheet (left in the screen shot image) along with a list of weightings (right). I was able to click on the weightings and change them to suit me, and then hit the "ReRank now" button at the top to change the rankings. I think clicked on "Sort" to put the rankings in order.

I like that it shows what the original rankings are. Rankings can be created based on a number of factors (such as price, LSAT percentile, employment of graduates, student/faculty ratio, number of volumes in the library, budget for learning, and whether Tibetan food is available within 600 m from the law school) weighted however you like.

This is obviously poking fun at–and poking holes in–law school rankings. They call it a "game" I'm sure to avoid any liability in case of inaccuracies in the data. Still, it looks to be a useful tool.

Under the section How to Protect from Ranking-mania there is a discussion about the problems with rankings, and how to evaluate a law school. Some good advice:

Do your homework.What should you look to choose a school if rankings are so unhelpful? To determine which school should be tops on your list, read what you can about all the schools under consideration. Look for information on internet web sites and in libraries. Other sources you might consult include The University of Richmond Pre-Law Handbook, the Boston College Online Law School Locator, and the listserv at lawsch-l@american.edu. More important, visit the schools. Find out what courses are regularly offered in specialties you consider important. Talk to the students. Find out if teachers are accessible and committed to devoting substantial energy to teaching. Find out if faculty members have published in areas important to you. Talk to faculty members. Only by doing those kinds of things can you begin to tell where you will fit in well. Along with the Deans of more than 150 law schools, I urge you not to rely on published rankings. Instead, do your own leg work and find the school that best meets your needs. It will be worth it.

Related:

I have spent the last few weeks preoccupied with making sure E exams here at Schulich Law proceed in an orderly fashion, and being grateful that I was spending my time on this side of the classroom, so to speak, as in not writing 100% finals. Law School pedagogy has been point of some conjecture here at Slaw in the past, but what I thought I would do this time is go old skool on this post and provide a bibliography of some of the literature that has been produced on the gauntlet that is the law school exam….what can I say? The atmosphere at exam time around a law school does strange things to one's mind. Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, the law school exam has not been a frequent topic in law journals; perhaps once they have been written most want to forget the experience?

• Bell, Derrick A. "Law school exams and minority-group students." (1981) 7 Black Law Journal 304.
• Crane, Linda. "Grading law school examinations: making a case for objective exams to cure what ails 'objectified' exams." (2000) 34 New England Law Review 785.
• Filisko, G.M. "How best to build a lawyer? Ideas float about changing law school and bar exams, but few show that they have sticking power." (2006) 92 ABA Journal 38.
• Gomberg, Linda. "How to Do Your Best on Law School Exams." (1988) 15 Western State University Law Review 875.
• Henderson, William D. "The LSAT, law school exams, and meritocracy: the surprising and undertheorized role of test-taking speed." (2004) 82 Texas Law Review 975.
• Hunt, James L. "Thinking like a lawyer? Two Southern law school exams from the 1870s." (2003) 11 The Journal of Southern Legal History 107.
• "Learning and licensing: law school and bar exams." (1982) 68 ABA Journal 544.
• Motley, Janet. “A foolish consistency: the law school exam” (1986) 10 Nova Law Journal 723.
• Phillips, Jerry J. "Thirteen rules for taking law exams." (2005) 72 Tennessee Law Review 797.
• Shekerjian, Denise G. "How to do your best on law school exams." (1983) 2 Adelphia Law Journal 121.
• Sheppard, Steve. "An informal history of how law schools evaluate students, with a predictable emphasis on law school final exams." (1997) 65 UMKC Law Review 657.
• “When You Come to a Fork in the Road, Take It, and Other Sage Advice for First-time Law School Exam Takers” (2006) 22 Georgia State University Law Review 653.

The most recent issue of the Canadian Law Library Review has a nice article by American attorney Sonia J Buck titled "Movie Therapy for Law Students (and Their Instructors)."

Consistent with my views, the author advocates the use of law-related movies in teaching the law to students. She draws on several movies for specific purposes (e.g., Adam's Rib and Suspect for ethics, evidence and criminal law), North Country for employment law, and Flash of Genius for IP Law).

In hindsight, I was embarrassed to not have included the obvious choice of Flash of Genius for my law-related movies website, so I have updated my site to include that movie (along with Hart's War, a military court martial movie), bringing the total number of law-related movies on my site to 118 movies.

I have also added reference to her book Movie Therapy for Law Students (and Pre-Law, Paralegal, and Related Majors) (Bloomington, IN: Authorhouse, 2009), along with some other books about law-related movies she cites in the article.

Here's the only existing study of the citation rates of open access legal journals v. their toll access counterparts. OA legal articles garner a 58% better citation rate.

The University of Western Ontario has been the only common law school in Canada without a student-run law review. Until now.

After years and several attempts of starting a student-run law review, the faculty finally approved the launch of a new peer-reviewed legal journal. This current effort started over a year ago, when I thought that it was ridiculous that we didn't have our own academic publication that our student body could get involved with and administer themselves.

After consulting with a number of other colleagues in my year with a background in publishing, notably Joel Welch, Kamila Pizon, and Leo Law, I founded the Western Law Review Association to formalize our efforts to launch a review and gain full support of the student body. The students following us continued the task to fruition, eventually gaining the support of the school through a number of revisions and a presentation to the entire faculty.

The current students responsible for the launch include: Justin Anisman (1L), Suzie Chiodo (3L), Lisa Di Valentino (2L, president), John Mather (2L), Rajeeve Thakur (3L), and Ben Tinholt (2L). The current faculty advisors include: Erika Chamberlain, Valerie Oosterveld, Sam Trosow, and Margaret-Ann Wilkinson.

The final name the students decided on for the journal was the University of Western Ontario Journal of Legal Studies (Western Journal of Legal Studies for short). A significant debate still exists over the credibility of an exclusively online journal compared to a print publication, and the costs associated with the latter option bear close scrutiny. A more central discussion surrounds whether the journal should be topic-specific or of a general nature.

The students aim to have their first issue published by December 2011, an ambitious goal that all of you can assist with by helping to spread the word. They will initially be publishing student submissions.

History of Student Reviews at UWO

This student-run law review will not be the first at Western Law. In 1959 the Western Law Review (U.W.O. L. Rev.) was established the same year the school opened its doors, releasing its first issue in 1961. By 1962-1963, the circulation extended to the Middlesex Bar Association, with contributions from both faculty and members of the bar. Circulation continued to increase, with Carswell Ltd. of Toronto distributing in 1964, and an entry in the Index to Legal Periodicals in 1965.

But in 1965 the journal changed its name to the Western Ontario Law Review, and by this point most of the contributions were by faculty members and articling students. By 1968, student contributions had ceased, although editing and administration continued by the student body. Student cotnributions resumed briefly in 1969.

The student law journal changed its name yet again in 1976 to the University of Western Ontario Law Review, and was picked up by Wilfred Laurier University Press in 1981. The final issue was published in 1986-1987, after 24 volumes since 1959. In its place, the school began a faculty-run journal with a more specific focus, the Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence (CJLJ).

The reason for the demise of the student review is speculated to include waning faculty interest in supporting the student review, and a perception that there were already too many law reviews on the market with a general focus.

Delivery Format and Focus

As may be expected, the students predominantly prefer an online journal. However, there is still considerable reservations that law journals are taken more seriously when they produce a printed publication.

Some American law journals that have moved online without compromising quality or reputation include The Harvard International Law Journal, The Harvard Law Review Project, and The Richmond Journal of Law and Technology.

Given the reasons for the previous renditions of Western's student law review being discontinued, the possibility of a topically-focused law review has been considered. But the best way to foster student participation in submitting articles would likely be a review with a more general focus.

The new law journal is already accepting submission for consideration in the first issue. A Facebook fan page can be found here. Spreading the word to potential contributors is the best way to ensure the new law review meets its goal of a first issue by the end of 2011.

Current Canadian Student Law Reviews

Here is a list of the current student-run law reviews in Canada:

Eastern Canada

Dalhousie Journal of Legal Studies (est. 1991)

University of New Brunswick Law Journal (est. 1947)

Central Canada

McGill Law Journal (est. 1952)

Queen’s Law Journal (est. 1971)

Ottawa Law Review (est. 1966)

Osgoode Hall Law Journal (est. 1958)

U of T Faculty of Law Review (est. 1942)
U of T Journal of Law & Equality (est. 2004)
Indigenous Law Journal (est. 2002)
Journal of International Law & International Relations (est. 2004)

Windsor Review of Legal and Social Issues (est. 1989)

Western Canada

Manitoba Law Journal (est. 1961)

Saskatchewan Law Review (est. 1967)

Alberta Law Review (UofC and UofA) (est. 1955)

UBC Law Review (est. 1959)

Appeal (UVic) (est. 1993)

Sample Website

Here is a sample of how the website design could appear:

The following is a very interesting article from the Economist on 3D printing technology that takes us one step closer to the replicator of Star Trek fame, "Print me a Stradivarius". Is there a name for the phenomenon of technological development mimicking Star Trek?

3D printing would seemingly be mind-blowing for Access Copyright; I'm sure some of you are aware of the approximately 1300% increase they have proposed for the post-secondary educational institution tariff that has become quite a quagmire in post-secondary circles as institutions try to grapple with the changes and figure out how to approach copyright. In light of this copyright mess I was pleased to see an announcement from Crown Copyright and Licensing (CCL) recently announcing "…that permission to reproduce Government of Canada works is no longer required, in part or in whole, and by any means, for personal or public non-commercial purposes, or for cost-recovery purposes, unless otherwise specified in the material you wish to reproduce." More info here. I can tell you that these copyright questions are affecting the law school casebook that we know (and either love or loathe) so well.

The Federation of Law Societies announced today that the Ad Hoc Committee on Approval of New Canadian Law Degree Programs had lived up to its name and approved the programs proposed by Lakehead University in Ontario and Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia. This national hurdle was established by agreement among the provincial law societies in 2009 as a logical outgrowth of the Federation's decision in 2007 to establish Canada-wide academic requirements for all Canadian law degrees, a process culminating in the approval by member societies of a set of National Requirements in 2010.

Lakehead University must still gain the approval of the Ontario government, as I understand it. While the proposed law school at Thompson Rivers has already received the approval of the B.C. government. The latter plans to operate using the program from the University of Calgary. From the Federation report:

Pursuant to a Licence Agreement entered into with the University of Calgary, the Thompson Rivers JD degree is proposed to be offered in conjunction with the University of Calgary which has granted to Thompson Rivers the licence to reproduce and use the undergraduate law programme and curriculum of the University of Calgary’s Faculty of Law.

The Ad Hoc Committee report is available in PDF and contains a chart showing the alignment of the applications of both universities with the Federation's national requirements. The full proposals of Lakehead and Thompson Rivers are also available on the Federation website.

At present there are twenty operating law schools in Canada.

One of the joys (and irritations) of Twitter is the receipt of unexpected alien tweets courtesy of the people you follow. (I think you can turn this feature off in most Twitter clients, if the thought of entertaining friends of friends alarms you.) Thus, thanks to Rob Hyndman (@rhh) I learn via PEI of a post on Paul Mason's blog, Idle Scrawl, on the BBC site.

The post is "Twenty reasons why it's kicking off everywhere," and it lays out twenty bullet points that would provide fodder for a discussion about recent social ferment, particularly in Europe and North Africa, and how it's not happening quite the way some of us oldies might expect. What particularly caught my eye was his point #11, which culminates a thread that starts with #9:

9. The specifics of economic failure: the rise of mass access to university-level education is a given. Maybe soon even 50% in higher education will be not enough. In most of the world this is being funded by personal indebtedess – so people are making a rational judgement to go into debt so they will be better paid later. However the prospect of ten years of fiscal retrenchment in some countries means they now know they will be poorer than their parents. And the effect has been like throwing a light switch; the prosperity story is replaced with the doom story, even if for individuals reality will be more complex, and not as bad as they expect.

10. This evaporation of a promise is compounded in the more repressive societies and emerging markets because – even where you get rapid economic growth – it cannot absorb the demographic bulge of young people fast enough to deliver rising living standards for enough of them.

11. To amplify: I can't find the quote but one of the historians of the French Revolution of 1789 wrote that it was not the product of poor people but of poor lawyers. You can have political/economic setups that disappoint the poor for generations – but if lawyers, teachers and doctors are sitting in their garrets freezing and starving you get revolution. Now, in their garrets, they have a laptop and broadband connection. [emphasis in the original]

You can see how that might be. In my time I've seen plenty of people come to law school with no more focused ambition than to become, if not expensive, then well-to-do; and — more important, because a plumber will likely make more in a lifetime than the average lawyer — a well-thought-of pillar of some community or other. But money's the measure, in most cases, and a large body of unemployed and possibly articulate law grads could indeed, I suppose, turn to pulling down the pillars they didn't get to be.

A couple of years ago I posted on the few offerings about law that were available on iTunes U, Apple's semi-successful attempt to corral some serious podcasts and videos. I've had another look and find that the corpus has grown — though it hasn't exploded in the way I imagined it might — and now contains a fair number of worthwhile lectures, both audio and video.

Searching for law in iTunes U isn't particularly easy. There's no category for it per se, and it's variously plunked in other slots in the roster of topics. And searching for "law" either in the title or in the "description" throws up a plethora of lectures with law's scientific and other meanings. But I've managed to find just over a dozen universities that have put law-related material on iTunes U, and I've made a spreadsheet of my findings, with links that will take you directly to iTunes or to a web page that contains a link over to iTunes (linking to iTunes proper being another thing Apple and the universities have to work on).

The spreadsheet, set out below, is done in Google Docs, so it will update if and when people send me material that I've missed. You can copy this link as well — http://bit.ly/frpOWj — which takes you to a Google webpage containing the data, which will also update as need be, and which is not as cramped for width as the embedded material here.

The law student of 1594 passed Christmas revelling to The Comedy of Errors by Shakespeare. We know this because of the Gesta Grayorum which was printed in 1688 from a much older manuscript. This text has been conveniently reproduced with an introduction on the Mr. Shakespeare blog.

We can also look forward to a 3 volume set, part of the Records of Early English Drama series, to be published in January 2011 by Boydell & Brewer: Inns of Court, edited by Alan H. Nelson and John R. Elliott, Jr. According to the publisher's blurb:

The Introduction provides a survey of Christmas entertainment supervised by Inns of Court Masters of the Revels and Christmas Princes, including minstrels, a lion-tamer, musicians, disguisings, plays, masques, and even a puppet-show. The illustrations (ground-plans and plates) offer evidence of the original performance conditions for Inns of Court plays and masques.

The appendices will reproduce a number of relevant documents.

A brief account of the Grand Christmases celebrated at the Inns of Court can be found in Anton-Hermann Chroust, in "The Beginning, Flourishing and Decline of the Inns of Court: The Consolidation of the English Legal Profession after 1400" (1956) 10 Vand. L. Rev. 79-123 (Hein), at 102-3:

The fact that the Inns of Court were also schools of manners should explain the original meaning and functions of those periodic entertainments "which are called revels," and which for a long time played an important role in the lives of the Inns. These pastimes apparently were encouraged by the Benchers who believed that such activities would greatly improve the literary tastes and the social manners of the students.²⁸ Revels and masques were usually held at Christmas time or some other feast day, and the King as well as the Queen attended them regularly.²⁹ Some of these revels were given to celebrate [103] an important social or political event, and occasionally a renowned artist or poet lent his genius to these entertainments. Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors was first played at Gray's Inn in 1594, and his Twelfth Night was acted at the Middle Temple in 1602. These revels, like the Grand Christmas, were meant to be a mimic Court to teach proper manners or courtly demeanor to the nobility and gentry. They were a very serious business, and the holding of the various offices attached to these festivities³⁰ was an important step to being ultimately chosen Reader or a Master of the Bench. During the austere rule of the Commonwealth these entertainments were discontinued, and, although they saw a resurrection during the Restoration, the Glorious Revolution finally put an end to them. The last record of Middle Temple as regards Grand Christmas and revels is an order of November 26, 1669: "No Grand Christmas shall be kept nor gaming suffered in the Hall."
————————–
28. Francis Bacon, however, seems to have had some rather serious doubts as to the educational value of the revels.
29. The revels were presided over by a mock King or mock Prince, who at Gray's Inn was called "Prince of Purpoole" (named after the manor of Portpoole or Purpoole, close to the village of Holborn), at the Middle Temple "Prince d'Amour," at the Inner Temple "Prince of Sophie," and at Lincoln's Inn "Prince de la Grange."
30. These offices were the Steward for Christmas, Marshal, Butler, Constable of the Tower, and Master of the Revels.

Cynthia Vukets of The Star covered today a new study that predicts the success of lawyers based on their law school yearbook photo,

A University of Toronto professor has found that he can predict how much money a law firm will make just by looking at university yearbook photo of the managing partner.

“We found that power is what predicts their success,” said Nicholas Rule, a psychologist. “It’s the impression of power that one gets from someone’s face.”

He took yearbook photos of the managing partners of the 100 top US law firms and showed them to college students. Students rated the faces on various characteristics that create impressions of power and warmth.

Law firms making the most money for the number of cases they handled had managing partners with the highest “power” rating. The same applies to politicians and CEOs, said Rule.

Although David Bilinsky has previously mentioned the study here on Slaw, The Star sent a few notable legal personalities to Rule to see what he thought about them, and the results are worth checking out.

I was initially resistant to this hypothesis, especially if it was a biologically-based claim. It would sound too similar to the now-discredited phrenology, and wouldn't account for skeletal differences for racialized minorities. So I decided to actually read the study, and found that the authors clearly identify a sociological phenomenon occurring,

Thus, in the domain of leadership, individuals who look like better leaders could actually become better leaders because they are more often chosen for leadership positions, are more likely to be treated like leaders by their peers and mentors, and are given more opportunities to develop leadership abilities.

The power domain measured in the study was broken down into dominance and facial maturity, whereas the warmth composite was comprised of likeability and trustworthiness. Each composite was then correlated profit margin, profitability index, and profits per equity partner. Controls were introduced for the influence of facial attractiveness, affect ratings, the number of lawyers per firm, and years of experience for the managing partner being rated. (An affect rating is an attribution of emotion to the targets' posed expressions intercorrelated with the targets' actual emotion traits).

As mentioned, the power domain was positively correlated with the financial profitability of the firm, which the authors attribute to firm leadership. While recognizing the limitations of their assumptions, they do overlook the "black babyface effect," where studies have shown that powerful faces actually hurt the success of visible minorities.

With that important caveat highlighted, I realize that I am the Slaw contributor chronologically closest to having their law school yearbook picture on hand. This composite of myself was actually being used for our yearbook, until they replaced it with a less "powerful" pose:

The additionally commentary was provided by Logan Rathbone, a colleague of mine responsible for the pictures used in the yearbook in our year, who had some fun with this picture.

What do you think? Lots of money in my future (based on the facial features alone), or a lifetime of frustration over global conquest?

Having finished two weeks of database training with the 1st year law students, there a few disjointed and loosely connected thoughts that have occurred to me. I should probably spend a bit more time ruminating on these before I post; however, this is the interweb, so half-baked thoughts are the order of the day. I was happy with how the students did this year but a few things jump out. Keyword searching is great, I use it all the time but I have also been keyword searching for a long time and have some specialized training in searching. If you are new to an area or to search operators in general, forgo keyword searching and look for indexes or browse functionality where experts have gone before you and done the heavy lifting. If you are in law school and especially first year law school, the work has been done before, by experts in the field, don't try to reinvent the wheel.

I think the prevalence of keyword searching has made people lose track of the interconnectedness of information. With keyword searching you don't necessarily see the connections between the layers of information that you are using. This is especially significant in law where legislation, caselaw, secondary sources and proper citation are all intrinsically linked. People who are accustomed to typing a few words into a search engine don't always seem to fully comprehend that they are looking for a linked chain rather that a result list from a keyword search.

As much as I like Google and use it constantly, I place the blame for over-reliance on keyword searching at Google's doorstep. It is in light of this that the following article caught my attention having been tweeted by a colleague a short time ago: "Google is polluting the internet: The danger of allowing an advertising company to control the index of human knowledge is too obvious to ignore". The idea of a public search engine or in other terms, a collaborative public project on the organization of knowledge is one that I find appealing.

In addition to our post last Monday, here is the video of what happened at Dalhousie Law School during the Wickwire Lectures.

Our thanks to Richard Devlin and his colleagues for making it available. Wickwire Lecture 2010

Be patient with it loading – it's a 1350 MB beast of a file, which will load wonderfully on university broadband, but may be slow to load on the computers of mere mortals.

Along with the ghouls and the goblins, Dante is always a solid choice for anything with a Halloween theme. The epic poem the Divine Comedy has been in my thoughts lately; where Dante contrasts notions of heaven, hell and purgatory and allegorical journeys towards truth.

In Paradisio, Dante depicts heaven or paradise as a series of concentric spheres, including the 7th sphere or Saturn, the Contemplatives who embody temperance. Temperance: the trait of avoiding excesses.

In the Purgatorio or Purgatory, Dante encounters seven levels of suffering and explores the nature of sin, theorizing that all sin derives from love,"…either perverted love directed towards others' harm, or deficient love, or the disordered love of good things."

In the Inferno Dante encounters nine circles of hell, of which the 7th Circle of Hell houses the violent. The 7th circle is composed of three rings composed of the outer ring, the middle ring and the inner ring. The inner ring is where the blasphemers, or the violent against nature and god or truth reside.

Why have my thoughts turned to Dante recently? (Other than the time of year). Because I have been grappling with the 7th ed. of the Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation and I must say that in my experience with the 7th ed., it is far closer to the 7th circle of hell than the 7th sphere of heaven. After all, the 7th sphere of heaven is of temperance, the avoidance of excess, and I would suggest that expunging the use of the period completely out of a citation is indeed excess, a distinct lack of temperance. So it certainly could not be the 7th sphere of heaven. As we examine Purgatorio we get closer to the 7th ed. experience or we get warmer. And I'm quite certain that the sin of the 7th ed. did indeed come out of a disordered love of good things. "It seemed like a good idea at the time."

While the 6th Circle of hell is where the heretics reside and on the surface seems much closer to the 7th ed. experience one must remember that it is the inner circle of the 7th circle where the blasphemers against truth and nature reside. While the 7th ed. contains some heresy, I would suggest that the treatment that the 7th ed. gives to the period is closer to blasphemy v. the truth. After all there are long established conventions for the use of the period in the English language. Such as when using abbreviations or initials in a name.

The reactions I have been receiving to the 7th ed. have been, at best, mixed. The most common reaction to the dropping of the period is, "Why? Why did they do this?" While I do not want to misrepresent my anecdotal evidence, some have been very happy about the expunging of the period, most, including first year students who have never used the guide before, do not understand the lack of the period. By an extremely good argument I can see the point of view (though not agree) with the dropping of the period from the reporter abbreviation. I must refer back to the use of the period in the English language established over several centuries. I have even had a first year student, say, "that doesn't look right". This is all further complicated when you are trying to teach first year students about legal citation when EVERY source they use retains the period. Furthermore, we have Statute Citation where the disordered love love included 2.1.1 Statutes, which in the general form does not mention commas separating chapter numbers and pinpoints, nor are commas included in the examples with 2.1.1; yet at 2.1.10 tje 7th ed. clearly states, "To cite a specific section of a statute, place a comma after the chapter and then indicate the section or sections", in their lust (second circle) to expunge the period were editors omitted from the process? And what happened to other areas badly in need of addressing such as alternative formats found on the web?

While the 7th ed. has been a point of some conjecture since it came out this summer, I feel that this is an issue that still needs to be beat, preferably with a large, heavy, object. The McGill is the Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation, but lately I have been wondering if there might be room for another guide to legal citation in Canada? Or at the very least a supplement to the 7th ed.

While the Divine Comedy "…describes Dante's travels through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven; at a deeper level it represents allegorically the soul's journey towards god(truth)"; am I going so far as to say that that legal citation is an allegory for the legal soul's journey towards truth? Is cleanliness of citation next to godliness? Each legal soul has to determine that for themselves on their own journey towards legal truth.

Trick or Treat!

The days when law students lament over whether they should "blog" are surely over when the Dean of Law has their own blog.

Lorne Sossin, Dean of Osgoode Hall, has just launched Dean Sossin's Blog, where he "can draw your attention to topics that affect Osgoode, our students and the broader legal and academic community." The sole post is from Monday, and provides a response to Maclean's always contentious 2010 law school rankings.

It's not off to a bad start, although there could be greater use of the hyperlinking function. There also appears to be a significant delay in approving the moderated comments. But the use of a shortened-url in there (bit.ly) does indicate some level of social media of sophistication.

Oh, and in case you didn't notice, he's been on Twitter since the summer.

Maybe now we can move beyond whether if law students and faculty should be blogging/tweeting, and instead start focusing on what the content should be.

Sujit Choudhry of the University of Toronto was recently awarded the Trudeau Foundation Fellowship. Fellows are selected based on their research achievements, creativity and social commitment.

Choudhry is a constitutional law professor who has had increased profile in Canada in recent years working as intervenor in a number of cases and commenting in the media on public affairs issues. In the UofT press release Choudhry indicates he will use the $225,000 provided by the award to develop post-conflict constitution-making.

An interview with The Globe can be seen here.

As part of a new Academic Success and Wellness program at York University's Osgoode Hall Law School, Ronda Bessner, the Assistant Dean of the Juris Doctor (JD) Program, led a session this past Monday called From Keele Street to Bay Street: Learning About the Writing & Research Skills Necessary to Succeed in the Legal Profession.

I had the pleasure of being one of several persons on a panel of practitioners who dealt with legal research and writing in their work in one way or another, along with Chief Law Librarian Louis Mirando and a 3rd year Osgoode Hall student who had summered at a downtown firm.

Around half of the audience of close to 30 to 40 students were in first year law with the remainder being upper year law students or (international) graduate law students. The group seemed relatively engaged in the discussion and I appreciated the fact that they came out to such a session, the purpose of which was (in part) to discuss the importance of legal research and writing in law practice and what students can be doing in law school to better prepare themselves.

At the risk of over-simplying the discussion, what follows below is a summary of the advice of the various panel members, advice that seemed relatively unanimous across the entire panel.

From Keele Street to Bay Street:

• in law school, research demands are sometimes artificially simplified since students are often given the cases or other readings, lessening the need to find relevant material on their own

• in addition, writing in law school tends to be more academic, whereas in practice, there is a need to be more practical, more direct and pointed in your conclusions

• some students might be surprised by the importance and role of legislation in law practice (and in real life)

• lawyers in law firms who assign research to a student want the comfort to know that students have first consulted the standard secondary research tools (books, journal articles, encyclopedias, case digests, reference tools) before delving into case law or legislative research

• updating research is critical, whether case law or legislation

• students new to conducting "real life" research in law firms are sometimes initially too shy at coming to conclusions in their memo or may not grapple with the issue and do the required analysis of applying the law to their client's issues.

• in some situations, no amount of research practice in law school can prepare you for some unique research problems in real life

• talking to someone (a peer or law librarian, for example) can save hours of research and help identify issues or put your research into better context

• legal citation and good writing matters both in law school and law practice – get to know your McGill Guide citation

• legal research and writing is critical to the work that lawyers do; some students might be surprised by the level of scholarship in law firms (in the form of the books, papers and articles that lawyers write)

• research is an iterative or circular process where you often revisit the same resources as you refine your research and identify new avenues or approaches; using checklists to make sure you have not missed any steps is also useful

• in addition to research memos, letters, and sample court pleadings/factums, students will often be called on to help write CLE papers, client bulletins or chapters in books; for drafting agreements, most lawyers consult internal or commercially-published precedents, something law students are not necessarily exposed to in law school

• finally, there was brief mention of knowledge management and legal project management, two topics important in practice but (understandably, in a way) not discussed much in law school

A big thanks to Ronda for organizing the session.

Chris Mondics at the Philadelphia Inquirer wonders if the legal market has seen the worst of the biggest recession in the legal industry since the Great Depression,

For law firms, the devastation that swept through the legal marketplace in 2008 and 2009 has come to an end. Layoffs have stopped or at least have been sharply curtailed, firms that suspended hiring are recruiting once again, and profits, though flat or down, have stabilized at numbers that would make average middle-class American wage earners click their heels with delight.

Even the sky-high starting salaries for first-year lawyers, long the source of client frustration and complaints, appear to have come through largely unscathed.

But Mondics notes that changes in compensation fail to provide the complete picture of what law firms are experiencing. He cites James Leipold of the National Association for Law Placement, who reveals that law firms have been cutting costs elsewhere, through exploring more opportunities in legal outsourcing. They're also looking to remove non-equity partners from the firm structure. To my knowledge, only a small handful of Canadian firms employ the non-equity partnership model.

He also cites Larry Ribstein, associate dean at the University of Illinois College of Law, who suggests that billings are not increasing, and are not likely to increase in the coming years. Ribstein specializes in law-firm management and economics, and recently published a paper in the Wisconsin Law Review, The Death of Big Law, where he provides a very thorough (over 60 pages) explanation why the traditional model of large firms is in trouble. Some large law firms will continue to exist, but many will splinter into smaller, more specialized firms. Although firms require outside capital survive, most are not structured to develop the infrastructure needed to attract this capital.

Ribstein identifies four major implications for law schools from his observations:

1. Shifting demands in law graduates will affect the demand and price of legal education. Law schools will have to find more cost-effective models to meet market needs.
2. Much of the training often delegated to law firms will have to occur in law school. (See the post on the Canadian Clinical Legal Education Conference)
3. Law schools will have to offer more business backgrounds to account for the changing roles of lawyers, with increased emphasis on in-house counsel. Providing technical legal advise without a proper business context won't work any more. He points to Richard Susskind's The End of Lawyers?: Rethinking the nature of legal services to suggest a move from custom advice to sale of legal commodities.
4. The demand for regulation of lawyers might be reconfigured by greater dissemination of legal information.

According to Ribstein, the last factor of legal regulation is probably the most significant. He points to three major principles which impede dissemination of legal information:

1. Legal regulation has historically focused on the solicitor-client relationship, which can at times conflict with the goals of big law firms.
2. Legal advice is restricted to those who are licensed, which impedes alternative methods of delivery.
3. Legal regulation focuses on the jurisdiction where a lawyer is licensed, which requires greater multi-jurisdiction uniformity for firms to evolve along organic business structures.

He explains how each of these principles provide unique challenges to big law firms, and offers some ideas of how they can be addressed.

If "necessity is the mother of innovation," there might be some upside to the financial difficulties experienced by big law. Ultimately the pressure on the legal industry might be the impetus for restructuring and change that many of us have been waiting for.

In Windsor Law, we do not just believe in social and legal justice, we live it.

One member of the faculty is challenging the validity of that slogan. Dr. Emily Carasco of Windsor Law has filed a human rights complaint against the law school and co-faculty member Dr. Richard Moon, as a result of the school's search for a new Dean.

A background of the facts are available through The Windsor Star here, here and here. A copy of the Appendix to the complaint is also available through the Star here, which also outlines the background and basis for the complaint.

A source that has requested to remain anonymous has provided a more complete copy of Form 1 which I've provided here, and the responding letter by the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario (HRTO) here.

I've mined this territory previously but it is worthwhile to visit every September. Each year at this time, Beloit College produces it's Mindset List, in their words "It provides a look at the cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering college this fall." In the academic environment it is always a good reminder to have a look at the current list in preparation for our new year. This year's incoming class is the Class of 2014 some of the highlights of their mindset include:

• Few in the class know how to write in cursive
• Email is just too slow, and they seldom if ever use snail mail.
• Clint Eastwood is better known as a sensitive director than as Dirty Harry.
• They never twisted the coiled handset wire aimlessly around their wrists while chatting on the phone.

Entire 2014 List

That class; however, are the incoming undergraduates. More appropriately for my environment is the Class of 2010, which is theoretically, advancing to Law School after graduating from undergrad last spring. Some of their highlights include:

• There has always been only one Germany.
• They have never heard anyone actually "ring it up" on a cash register.
• Text messaging is their email.
• They have always known that "In the criminal justice system the people have been represented by two separate yet equally important groups."
• They have always been able to watch wars and revolutions live on television.

Entire 2010 List

And coming to a Law Firm near you, those who graduated from Law School last year, who were the undergrad Class of 2007. Highlights:

• "Ctrl + Alt + Del" is as basic as "ABC."
• An automatic is a weapon, not a transmission.
• There has always been some association between fried eggs and your brain.
• They would never leave their calling card on someone’s desk.
• Computers have always fit in their backpacks.
• Yuppies are almost as old as hippies
• Peeps are not a candy, they are your friends.

Entire 2007 List

The list started in 1998 and as far back as 2002 is available online. It would be interesting if the list would work backwards through mindsets as well so as to serve as a point of comparison with the incoming classes, I suspect a comparison between the mindsets of the classes of 1974, 1984, 2004 and 2014, would be both highly amusing and highly instructive.

As he does every year at about this time, Rich McCue surveys the incoming law students at the University of Victoria about their use of technology. The 2010 results are available on his blog, Rich's Random Thoughts. This year for the first time students were questioned about mobile technology and about their typing speed.

The executive summary follows:

• 50% of incoming students own “Smart Phones” that can browse the internet.
• 99% of students own laptops, and 27% own both a laptop and a desktop computer.
• 44% of student laptops are Macs.
• The average laptop price dropped to $1,198 from $1400 in 2007, and from $2,100 in 2004.
• Of the 72% of students who were able to tell us how many words per minute (wpm) they could type, the average was 60 wpm. Only 14% type less than 40 wpm.
• All students now report having high speed internet in their homes.
• 71% of students bring their laptops to school almost every day.
• 87% of students own MP3 players capable of listening to recorded lectures.
• 49% of students use Gmail as their primary email account, 6% use UVic email and 26% Hotmail.
• 67% of students identified MS Word as their favorite tool for collaborative document editing. 27% chose Google Docs, 2% OpenOffice Writer & 5% “Other”.
• 100% of students now have access to high speed internet at their homes.
• 91% of students use Facebook and 80% of those students would like to see law school events and activities published on Facebook as well as through the online faculty calendar of events.

Now if only all law schools would do this, we'd have an even better picture not only for law profs and administrators but also for law firms anticipating future hires.

[photo credit: bradleygee]

In Friday's episode of Law Librarian Conversations podcast, we talked with two social media-savvy third year law school students to get a dose of reality on what they think about social networking, online communication, legal research and practice skills. Our guests were Laura Bergus from Iowa who runs a legal podcast called Legal Geekery and writes for Lawyerist.com and Huma Rashid from Chicago's John Marshall Law School, who runs a personal blog called The Reasonably Prudent Law Student where she offers budget fashion tips and thoughts on being a law student. Both Laura and Huma participate in the Social Media Law Student site.

My big question for them was about how their participation in social networking would be viewed by future employers, and was surprised that one felt law firms would not be looking at this unless she was involved in profession-related discussions online, while the other had been approached for work through the social networks.

A recent article in the Globe & Mail discussed the phenomenon of older students in university, driven in part by the recession,

Universities across Canada report a growing number of mature undergraduates – typically adults older than 25 who have taken more than a year off school – who are choosing to study full-time in order to find new careers or increase their competitive edge in a job market that is still reeling from the economic downturn…

A 2009 study by the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada found that full-time enrolment for students of all ages had increased by more than four per cent that year, and speculated that the economy was the driving factor.

Although there's no indication yet that this has affected law school enrolment in Canada as well, it's probably fair to presume that some undergraduate students will opt to stay in school longer and others already in the workforce might seek to upgrade their credentials.

In my first column in The Lawyers Weekly I introduce some anecdotal stories of older law students having difficulty finding articling positions, which they attribute to ageism. Is this a valid concern for law students, and if so, what are some of the solutions?

Could the opposite happen as well, with senior partners being pushed out by younger associates for not being productive enough?

Monterey College of Law in California is partnering with BARBRI, a law exam review/prep provider, to bring iPads to students in their first year law program this season. Students in their law school program tend to be older (average age 38), and the iPad is meant to help them better keep up with readings and study for bar exams.

From the August 25/10 article in Campus Technology:

"Many of our law students work the equivalent of three jobs. Between law school, work, and family, it is a constant challenge for them to set aside enough time during the week to study," said Wendy LaRiviere, dean of admissions, in a written statement issued today. "…[T]he iPad will provide time-challenged students an easy way to add 30 to 45 minutes of studying each day … during a lunch break, waiting in the car-pool line, or even getting their oil changed. The result will be an additional three to five hours per week of valuable study time. If our students use this 'found' time to do additional reading and incorporate a more extensive use of their class notes, study guides, and practice exams, we expect to see a positive result in law school performance and continued improvement in the bar pass rates of our graduates."

The school and the law exam review provider have worked to absorb the cost of the iPads so that students do not need to pay for them above their tuition fees.

The comments in the article mentioned above shed additional light on the program. From Mitch Winick from the Monterey College of Law:

The educational publisher (BAR BRI) is a unique source of law materials that 90+% of our students will purchase and use either during the JD program or as a post-graduate review program. Traditionally it would be delivered in print volumes. There are new iPad applications (and uses) that are being developed specifically for this program. In fact there are 16 e-books of review material that were made available this week only through iBooks. The text material is so voluminous that a smart phone delivery system is not appropriate . . . this is a case where size (and readability) does matter.

Has anyone heard of other schools developing similar technology programs? I had a quick look around but couldn't find anything comparable.

With the Law Librarian Conversations podcast settling into its new home at CALI (the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction), the new podcast Law School Tech Talk has now been started. David Dickens, Consulting Technologist at Pepperdine Law, is the host along with co-hosts and regular contributors: Jonathan Ezor (billed as "resident law prof"), Debbie Ginsberg ("Law Librarian"), and Ben Chapman ("another veteran IT guy"). They hope to cover all angles of law school technology.

From the email I received about the show:

We hope to have live shows for you about every two weeks; they should run 30 minutes, give or take.

Topics will include news and events relating to technology in law schools, and we'll usually have one special guest each show.

Our home on the web is here, where you can find our inaugural episode with special guest Tom Boone.

Find out more about our hosts, co-hosts, and regular panelists.

You can subscribe to Tech Talk shows as a podcast on iTunes.

We're also on Twitter.

To attend the next live recording of Law School Tech Talk online, today at 2 pm ET/1 pm CT, register here. It is organized and recorded on a webinar platform.

I was delighted to learn from a tweet by Lyonette Louis-Jacques, the International Law Librarian at the University of Chicago (and a Slaw columnist), that two of Karl Llewellyn's lectures are available in audio on the U of Chicago website. Llewellyn was an adherent of the U.S. "legal realism" movement and, perhaps most famously, the force behind the drafting of the Uniform Commercial Code.

One of his duties at Columbia, and later at the University of Chicago, was to deliver introductory lectures to first year students. His book The Bramble Bush, still read with pleasure today, came out of this duty. Karl Llewellyn died in 1962.

There are two audio files of Llewellyn available online: the 1957 "Elements of the Law: Introductory Lecture" [47 minutes] and the undated "Marriage and Family," [102 minutes] a classroom lecture.

In the former, you'll hear his forceful, indeed hectoring, voice hammering home to students the difficulty of practice and the importance of the duty each will have to clients. Some of what he says may be dated — he snaps at a student not to smoke — but the majority of it would benefit any law student, and not a few of the rest of us, perhaps.

We all have our grievances about law school, as remote as it may or may not have been for us personally. Maybe what's needed is greater academic discourse about the pedagogue of legal education.

The University of Western Ontario Law School is hosting Canadian Clinical Legal Education Conference on October 22-23, 2010. The program features a sitting Supreme Court Justice, legal academics, and legal administrators. Law societies should also be interested because John Campion, President of the Federation of Law Societies of Canada (FLSC) will also be speaking.

Speaker bios can be found here, and a draft agenda can be seen here. The conference is sponsored by the Law Foundations of Ontario and BC, as well as several law schools across Canada.

What will probably feature prominently during the conference is the 2007 the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching report called Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law [pdf summary]. The report notes that legal education is fundamental to a flourishing democracy, and provides 5 key observations:

1. Law School Provides Rapid Socialization into the Standards of Legal Thinking
2. Law Schools Rely Heavily on One Way of Teaching to Accomplish the Socialization Process
3. The Case-Dialogue Method of Teaching Has Valuable Strengths but Also Unintended Consequences
4. Assessment of Student Learning Remains Underdeveloped
5. Legal Education Approaches Improvement Incrementally, Not Comprehensively

The two major limitations identified under 3) above is that legal education rarely prepares students for professional practice, and fail to develop legal ethics and social skills.

Canada may have an advantage over our American counterparts through our articling process, which is not part of the typical classroom education but still considered a necessary component for preparation for the practice of law.

However, some educators are attempting to introduce more practical skills in the law school itself. The conference is hosted by Douglas Ferguson, who is the Director of UWO Law's Community Legal Services clinic. Participating students get exposure to a wide variety of legal subjects and gain experience in handling client files.

"The legal profession is undergoing huge changes, while legal education has changed very little in decades," said Ferguson. "The Carnegie Report has sparked major changes in law school curriculums in the US, and I think it’s time we launched a debate on legal education reform here in Canada."

In preparation for the conference the school has set up a Google Groups discussion page. All the talks during the conference will be uploaded onto YouTube, available through a media page.

A foreshadowing of what's to come in legal education? Perhaps, if educators want to keep students engaged and use tools they're most familiar with outside of the classroom.

"If you build it, he will come." (Field of Dreams (1998))

If you write it on Slaw, be prepared to be quoted.

I was watching Roy Halliday pitch, tonight. The game between the Philadelphia Phillies and the Cincinnati Reds was on TV. It was scoreless through almost 11 full innings. Philly scored in the bottom of the 11th to win, 1-0. The Reds pitcher – a rookie making only his 3rd start in the show - lost his perfect game in the top of the 9th. He surrendered his first and only hit. Halliday was "almost" as good. He gave up only 5, none well-hit. 

Jays fans will remember that Halliday once pitched for the Jays and lost a no-hitter and a shut-out in the top of the 9th. He still won, though. This is the second time in two weeks that I've had the pleasure of watching Halliday perform, even if it was on tv. Last Monday night, I did that while sitting in a tavern in Upper Montclair, New Jersey, drinking Sam Adams and eating good chicken wings.

The introduction has nothing to do with the title of this post, other thanto explain why I had to time to do other things than watch the game: not that it would surprise many who know me to hear that I was doing something else while watching a baseball game (other than sleeping, that is). So, having set the stage …

One of the other things I was doing was searching in Google Scholar for new, relevant, references to one of my current research interests: factual causation. Using my surname helps to limit the number of hits. One hit was, shall we say, surprising. It was a quotation, in a recently published U.S. text on legal eductation, from something I wrote on Slaw more than three years. I'd written, in a comment:

One question the writers of “legal eduction” studies might ask – perhaps they have, I’ve never bothered to look – is “what does it tell us about law as a discipline that so many people who claim they’re no good at math, sciences, philosophy, logic etc. (and whose transcripts show it), manage to get into law school and then do reasonably well”?

A recent text, Randall Kiser, Beyond Right and Wrong: The Power of Effective Decision Making for Attorneys and Clients (Springer, 2010), at 154-55, in the chapter titled "Law School Eductation?, sub-section titled "Probabilistic Decision Making and Statistical Analysis" quoted the not-so-rhetorical question as the summary for that section, introducing it this way: "The question posed by David Cheifetz, a Canadian barrister and solicitor and the author of Apportionment of Fault in Tort, remains a challenge to the law school admissions process and the legal profession: .. ". The context of Mr. Kiser's use of the quotation was established by the first sentence in the sub-section:

The casebook method introduces students to legal philosophy, opinion writing and some substantive law principles, but it neglects the methodological reasoning, probabilisitic decision making, and qualitative evaluation skills essential to accurate assessment of clients' positions and likely case outcomes.

 Mr. Kiser also wrote, quoting from (not surprisingly) a paper in the law and economics area published by the University of Chicago, written by a law professor at that school:

He [the professor] depicts law as a field functioning in the pre-science, pre-modern era: "legal practice seems at odds with scientific logic, or at least with probabilistic reasoning."

I suppose it's a good thing he didn't go on to include my use of the Quinn v. Leathem dictum about the illogic of law and my rhetorical statement-question, in the first comment in that thread, that "something which functions in a manner analogous to a western religion can’t always be logical, can it?"

Unfortunately for my book sales, Apportionment of Fault in Tort is (1) not a text likely to be purchased by many U.S. readers , (2) Mr. Kiser doesn't cite the publication details, and (3) in any event it is long out of print. On the other hand, he spelled my surname correctly.

In due course, I suppose I'll get the Kiser text from a library, or borrow it from some other source, and look through it. For now, I can find better use for the money it would cost to purchase it: $100-$140 (used to new, on Amazon and Chapters/Indigo). I suppose I could hope that somebody from Springer (the text publisher) happens to read Slaw and decides it would be worth sending me review copy. But then I'd have to read it and review it, right?

♫ Baby no need for false pretenses
Baby just shock me to my senses
Everything that you do feels right…♫

Lyrics and Music by Ryan Tedder, recorded by Jennifer Lopez "Do it Well".

In an article entitled: How Law Schools Can Produce Happier Students and Satisfied Lawyers, posted by the ABA Journal on Jun 22, 2010 and written by Debra Cassens Weiss, it is stated that:

Law schools need to do more than teach the legal basics—they also have a moral obligation to produce healthy and satisfied lawyers, a recent law grad asserts in an opinion column.

While many lawyers have felt that perhaps law schools didn't quite prepare them for the onslaught of the practice of law, asserting that law schools have a moral obligation to produce happy lawyers is perhaps just a bit novel to the rest of us.

Writing in the National Law Journal, Michael Serota says schools should emphasize the importance of students making career decisions based on their own professional values. “By helping them identify their professional values and make individual career decisions that correspond to those values, law schools can help lawyers and law students derive satisfaction from their professional lives,” Serota writes.

Citing statistics on lawyer depression from an article by Todd David Peterson and Elizabeth Waters Peterson, Serota says Lawyers have higher rates of depression than any other professional, after adjusting for socio-demographic factors, and are more likely to develop heart disease, alcoholism and drug use.

Apparently the problems also extend to law school. It is stated that, according to one study, 44 percent of law students meet the criteria for clinically significant levels of psychological distress. I wonder what the statistics for lawyers would be, based on these criteria?

The Peterson article (PDF) has another suggestion that could lead to happier law students: Study the students who manage to thrive in law school and find out why some law students are able to remain happy. The answers would help researchers identify what kinds of characteristics can buffer law students against depression.

Not utterly surprisingly:

The researchers’ own “modest empirical study” found that law students who found ways to use their top strengths in daily life were less likely to report depression and more likely to report satisfaction. The finding is consistent with workplace research that found employees who believe they have the opportunity to do what they do best have higher rates of retention, loyalty and productivity.

Of course our own renown Canadian researcher, Dr. Hans Selye, who did much of the ground-breaking work on stress, stated as follows:

What are the ingredients of a code of ethics that accepts egoism and working to hoard personal capital as morally correct? After four decades of clinical and laboratory research, I would summarize the most important principles briefly as follows:

1. Find you own stress level – the speed at which you can run toward your own goal. Make sure that both the stress level and the goal are really your own, an not imposed upon you by society, for only you yourself can know what you want and how fast you can accomplish it. There is no point in forcing a turtle to run like a racehorse or in preventing a racehorse from running faster than a turtle because of some "moral obligation." The same is true of people.

2. Be an altruistic egoist. Do not try to suppress the natural instinct of all living beings to look after themselves first. Yet the wish to be of some use, to do some good to others, is also natural. We are social beings, and everybody wants somehow to earn respect and gratitude. You must be useful to others. This gives you the greatest degree of safety, because no one wishes to destroy a person who is useful.

3. Earn thy neighbor's love. This is a contemporary modification of the maxim "Love thy neighbor as thyself." It recognizes that not all neighbors are lovable and that it is impossible to love on command.

Perhaps two short lines can encapsulate what I have discovered from all my thought and research:

Fight for your highest attainable aim,
But do not put up resistance in vain.

Could it be that law students and lawyers, to find happiness, just need to align their professional goals to do what feels right?