Every year at this time I head on over the Beloit College website to see just what the coming year(s) have in store for me and Beloit College produces the very striking “Mindset List”, which never fails to land a few jarring blows. The Mindset List, “provid(es) a look at the cultural touchstones and experiences that have shaped the worldview of students entering colleges and universities in the fall.” And remember even if you are not associated with academia the 1L list are the people that will be applying to work with you in the coming months.

Firstly, let’s . . . [more]

2 years in the making.

7 key findings.

22 recommended actions.

Those are the numbers behind the CBA’s Futures: Transforming the Delivery of Legal Services in Canada report, released today.

The initiative was established in 2012 to “examine the fundamental changes facing the Canadian legal profession and to help lawyers understand and respond to those changes.”

The 106-page report identifies seven key findings, the result of thousands of hours of work through commissioned research and extensive online and in-person consultations with “a broad cross-section of lawyers, clients, law students, and other legal stakeholders,” and in-depth interviews with selected innovators. . . . [more]

At the heart of ancient Palestine is the region known as the Shephelah, a series of ridges and valleys connecting the Judaean Mountains to the east with the wide, flat expanse of the Mediterranean plain. It is an area of breathtaking beauty, home to vineyards and wheat fields and forests of sycamore and terebinth. It is also of great strategic importance.

This is how Malcolm Gladwell begins his new book, released last fall, David and Goliath.

The Shephelah, Gladwell notes, was where John Hyrcanus of the Maccabees fought the Seleucid Empire (he calls “Syria”), before forcibly converting the inhabitants . . . [more]

In February 2011, Legal Help Centre (“LHC”) first opened its doors to the public. Since then, more than 5000 individuals have been served through the Centre’s drop-in clinics. The sole criteria to access LHC’s drop-in clinic services is household income <$50,000 per year, ensuring that those who are ineligible for Legal Aid but cannot afford private legal services have a place to go for information and support.

The LHC’s pro bono legal clinic model is unique in Canada in two key ways:

• LHC was started by and continues to be supported by two universities – the University of Manitoba and

Today is the payment deadline for the $3,164 fee levied by the Law Society of Upper Canada to fund its controversial new Law Practice Program, an alternate pathway to licensing for those unable or unwilling to secure articles. Regular readers of Slaw will recall that when the fee was announced in February, law students rallied against it – a petition calling for a more just and equitable model of funding the experimental program garnered more than 800 signatures.

While a few sympathetic benchers spoke up at Convocation in favour of the petition, the Law Society took no action. The chair . . . [more]

It was recently convocation time around here, with convocation comes the slate of honorary degrees that are awarded during the ceremonies. As someone who resides in the Faculty of Law I’ve noticed that most (though not all) honorary degree recipients receive a Doctor of Laws. This occurs even though the recipients may be getting their honorary degree during an Arts, Engineering or other ceremony, which leads to the obvious question, why? As it turns out the history and evolution of honorary degrees does not seem to be a well researched area and consensus is difficult to build. I was able . . . [more]

Mindy Kaling recently spoke at Harvard Law School’s 2014 Class Day ceremony, and the result was humorous, entertaining, and even insightful.

She started with what was probably a staged misunderstanding,

Graduates, parents, faculty, this is really such a remarkable day—obviously for you, but also for me, because after spending a life obsessing over true crime, the impossible happened: I was asked to speak at the Harvard Law commencement and accept an honorary legal degree. Yes, isn’t that the American dream? Me, Mindy Kaling—

[Kaling is interrupted, and informed that she was misinformed.]

OK, um, so apparently there was a little

I’m writing this post from (at the moment) sunny Winnipeg where I am attending the Canadian Association of Law Libraries annual conference. But I’m not going to talk about that today. Instead, what I want to focus on is Simon Canick‘s* recent article, “Infusing Technology Skills into the Law School Curriculum.” [1] I’ve been mentioning this article to many of my CALL colleagues and I think you can imagine why the title caught my attention.

When you look at the average law or university student you might find it odd that a question about technology skills . . . [more]

Thanks to Associate Professor of Law at the University of Saskatchewan Michael Plaxton for his discussion here on Slaw.ca earlier today. He alluded to some other discussion, so I thought it would be helpful to pull together some of those pieces for everyone.

Below is the letter from Annette Demers on behalf of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL/ACBD) and John Papadopoulos and Jeanne Maddix on behalf of the Canadian Council of Academic Law Library Directors which was also endorsed by Robert Thomas on behalf of the Saskatchewan Library Association. This was published on the CALL/ACBD website:

Ken

The University of Saskatchewan College of Law’s library, we have recently learned, is to be “reconfigured”. We have no idea, at the moment, what this re-configuration will entail. We can be reasonably confident that no one intends to burn down the library. But it seems over-optimistic to call it “safe” either.

Here is what we (sort of) know. There is talk of moving some (many? most?) of the books either to the Murray Library or to off-campus storage facilities. Materials moved to those facilities would be available within 48 hours. Much of the space in the . . . [more]

Last week I suggested that we need a greater emphasis on the students in legal education, instead of publications and sponsorship. A positive school experience as a student will typically result in an employee who is more engaged in their profession and experiences higher levels of well-being. The reason why this is important is because law school faculty have tangible effects on the trajectory of a lawyer’s career.

A new Gallup-Purdue study has shown that a student’s experience in school matters far less than the school they went to. The study suggests that what students are doing in school and . . . [more]

I’ve written extensively about the need for diversity in the legal profession, and for legal education to be more innovative and accessible. I haven’t touched on as much on one of the key missing pieces in legal education, which is the diversity of those providing the education to begin with.

Of course diversity in academia should be promoted for all the reasons we advocate for it to occur in the private sector – better creativity, more productivity, improved returns, and of course, the moral imperative to do so.

Part of this moral imperative includes the recognition that law school . . . [more]