Today’s Free Press has a piece by Chip Martin on the history of the University of Western Ontario law school – and a nice tribute to Ivan Rand. There’s a new biography of Rand on the horizon by Bill Kaplan which will likely deal with his involvement in the founding of the state of Israel.
There’ll be big celebrations all year in London Ontario. . . . [more]
Today is Ada Lovelace Day, honouring women in technology. From the website:
. . . [more]Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology.
Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines. Entrepreneurs, innovators, sysadmins, programmers, designers, games developers, hardware experts, tech journalists, tech consultants. The list of tech-related careers is endless.
Recent research by psychologist Penelope Lockwood discovered that women need to see female role models more than men need to see male ones. That’s a relatively
Dean of Osgoode Hall Law School, Patrick Monahan, has accepted the invitation of the President of York University to become York’s new Vice-President Academic and Provost. President Shoukri has indicated that the search for a new dean for the law school will be thorough and will take some time. Osgoode Professor Jinyan Li has agreed to become interim dean, during the search process. . . . [more]
I hadn’t seen before today the Master of Laws Guide which assembles in a single site comparative information for foreign graduate students contemplating the choice of schools where to study.
Back in the last century, when I had to face the same question, one was reduced to talking to law school teachers and colleagues about what they knew of a particular school. The amount of sheer misinformation that this generated was extraordinary. A law school’s reputation (for good or ill) lingers long after any facts may have changed.
My own advice (when asked by students) is to pick people not . . . [more]
The Geographies of Legal Education: Policy, Practice and Theory
May 25-27, 2009 Carleton University Ottawa
The 2009 annual meeting of the Canadian Association of Law Teachers (CALT) will be held May 25-27, 2009 at Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario. The annual meeting will be held in conjunction with Congress 2009 of the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences (CFHSS), and will follow the Canadian Law and Society Association’s meeting of May 23-25. This year’s CFHSS Congress theme is “Capital Connections: Nation, Terroir, Territoire.”
Building on Congress’s aim to consider the ways in which globalization has impacted the relationship between . . . [more]
We haven’t mentioned the Symposium (from the Greek – a Drinking Party) at Ryerson University. Billed as The Ryerson Symposium – Innovation in Legal Education: Ideas for the 21st Century, it was held on Tuesday, November 25th.
On the heels of reports published by two separate task forces examining aspects of legal education in Canada, expert panels examined key issues:
How will Canadian law schools shape society in the next century?
What are the latest developments in the licensing and accreditation of law schools and will it impact legal education?
. . . [more]Can new legal education models unleash innovation and increase accessibility?
Tip of the hat to Ian Kerr, who points us to Michael Giest’s latest project:
Why Copyright? Canadian Voices on Copyright Law
It’s a film on the significance of copyright as an issue in Canada. It features a wide range of Canadian voices – artists like Gordon Duggan of Appropriation Art; writers like award winning science fiction author Karl Schroeder; musicians like Wide Mouth Mason’s Safwan Javed; business people like Nettwerk Record’s Terry McBride, Lulu.com’s Bob Young, and Skylink Technologies’ Philip Tsui; government appointees like Privacy Commissioner of Canada Jennifer Stoddart and Ian . . . [more]
Links to a lengthy interview with Richard Susskind (parts 1 and 2) who continues to provoke with his explanations of how the English market for legal services is dramatically different from that in the United States, and how the Legal Services Act presages the future on this side of the Atlantic too.
One of the unplanned advantages of federal systems appears to be the way in which they militate against reforms of professional monopolies.
Good plugs for The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the nature of legal services , Richard’s book which will be imminently published by OUP.
The most . . . [more]
Dean Mayo Moran today presided over a webcast to launch UofT Law’s participation in Georgetown’s Center for Transnational Legal Studies which brings together in London faculty and students from ten nations and five continents to study international, transnational and comparative law. Georgetown Law Professors David Cole and Nina Pillard are the Academic Directors for the Center’s first year.
Georgetown’s initial partners in the Center include the Free University of Berlin, University of Fribourg (Switzerland), Hebrew University of Jerusalem, King’s College London, University of Melbourne, National University of Singapore, University of Sao Paulo, University of . . . [more]
Osgoode Hall Law School will officially announce today the launch of a new program in intellectual property law and technology, IP Osgoode, aimed at promoting interdisciplinary research and commentary in the field. The website features a student-run blog, IPilogue, and what will clearly be a growing body of resources for those interested in IP.
Professor Pina D’Agostino is the Director of the new program; she is joined by Osgoode Professors Carys Craig, Ikechi Mgbeoji, and IP Osgoode, Assistant Director, Rex Shoyama. An impressive Advisory Board has been assembled, which includes the Honourable Mr. Justice Marshall Rothstein, the Honourable . . . [more]
Alan M. Dershowitz, that prolific (some would say prolix) law prof, publicity hound and sometime proponent of torture, has published his third book this year: Is There A Right To Remain Silent? Coercive Interrogation and the Fifth Amendment After 9/11. It gets a good review in the New York Times from Johnathon Mahler, who finds the book for the mostpart accessible by lay readers and, where it becomes dense with constitutional law, worth pushing ahead even so.
The description on the Oxford University Press page says this of the book:
. . . [more]…Dershowitz puts forward a bold reinterpretation of the
Richard A. Posner, the outspoken justice on the Seventh Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals and University of Chicago law professor, has written a short piece for The New Republic, entitled “In Defence of Looseness,” in which he takes the U.S. Supreme Court to task for its decision in District of Columbia v. Heller [PDF], the case involving the second amendment to the U.S. Constitution dealing with arms and militias. As always, Posner is enjoyable to read because his mind is good and he expresses his arguments well. If you’re interested in constitutional or statutory interpretation, you’ll . . . [more]