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.

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 . . . [more]

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 — . . . [more]

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 . . . [more]

Are law school rankings legitimate? Play Indiana U's Law School Ranking Game

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 . . . [more]

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, . . . [more]

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. . . . [more]

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 . . . [more]

3D printing would seemingly be mind-blowing for Access Copyright

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 . . . [more]

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 . . . [more]