There has been much discussion about Trinity Western University (“TWU”) law school and whether or not, students who go to there should be able to practice law in Canada. I have no intention of wading into this very polarizing debate. What is more interesting, is the impact of three very different decisions about TWU, made by three different law societies.

No matter how one feels about TWU, one must consider the impact of any decision.

Decisions cannot, and should not, be made in a vacuum.

So, let’s recap.

The Federation of Law Societies claims to be the national co-ordinating body . . . [more]

Today marks the unofficial end of the school year around here with the last exam being written this morning. It has now been several years since we have adopted exam writing via computer and it is a now the standard. With that standard there are a few changes from the traditional scribbled examinations. Firstly, faculty members far prefer marking word processed exams as they no longer have to obtain special qualifications in hieroglyphics in order to mark exams. That alone is enough of a plus in the eyes of most and it is not really necessary to extoll the virtues . . . [more]

The annual countdown is on at law firm and other legal libraries where staff are preparing for summer law students to arrive. In many organizations the first week of May brings a bevy of enthusiastic faces who will need legal research training and an orientation to ‘research in the real world’. This year there is something new happening in Alberta to help with that real world transition.

The University of Calgary Law Library is the host of the Cenovus Continuing Legal Education: Research in the Real World. This summer law student specific, one-day legal research program is intended . . . [more]

It wasn’t so long ago that would-be lawyers didn’t go to law school. Instead, they were apprenticed to experienced lawyers and learned their skills on the job.

It wasn’t until the 1950s and 60s in Canada that law degrees became de rigeur and apprenticeships were compressed into an articling year to be completed before writing the bar exam.

Flash forward to an age of soaring law school tuition rates and declining job openings, when students complain of heavy debts and a lack of practical training, and suddenly the age-old apprenticeship seems like a suitable tool for modern times.

“Adding apprenticeship . . . [more]

I just couldn’t make a call on which REM song title is best for a post about law school exams…… Let’s knock out “It’s the End of the World as we Know it”, because it isn’t. The ironic part of me likes “Shiny Happy People” but I have to acknowledge “Everybody Hurts” and “Losing my Religion” are pretty good too. Why the song catalogue for a band from Georgia? You know this, the tip I want to give this week on the verge of exam period is to wear sunscreen …. wait that’s not it….get enough REM sleep whilst . . . [more]

In one of our later advanced legal research and writing class of the term, we turned our attention from traditional primary and secondary material to alternative or less-expected legal research resources. I posted earlier on the portion of the class in which we learned strategies to mine Twitter for legal research. The other broad angle we looked at addressed strategies and tools to assist in finding helpful secondary resources in legal blogs and other open web information sources.

Legal research in blogs

I think it’s fair to suggest legal blogs are so widespread and well-known that they may be . . . [more]

All of the student societies at Ontario’s seven law schools have agreed to participate in a newly formed Law Students Society of Ontario. At the moment the LSSO website contains only the following press release:

By this point in the term, our advanced legal research and writing class has covered all the favourite usual suspects: research plans, research records and journals, secondary research using legal and library databases, federal legislative research, provincial legislative research, primary research using the big three, UK research, US research, and so on. We’re saving EU legal research for next week.

But this week we took a small detour and looked at the use of social media as a resource for legal research. For instance, we examined the strategic use of Twitter as a legal research source, mainly for secondary information . . . [more]

Yesterday we concluded the Third Annual UCLA Cyber Crime Moot Court Competition in Los Angeles. This year the moot problem dealt with access of a public website through a scraper program to collect e-mail addresses for the purposes of illustrating security vulnerabilities.

The first issue in the case was roughly modelled after United States v. Auernheimer, 2012 WL 5389142 (D.N.J. 2012), which is expected to appear before the Third Circuit in the near future. In this case, a data breach at AT&T resulted in the theft of personal information of approximately 120,000 AT&T customers through the use of a . . . [more]

I came across a new research paper today via SSRN titled, “What Makes Lawyers Happy? Transcending the Anecdotes with Data from 6200 Lawyers“.

The legal profession has done a much better job of addressing (or at least discussing) the issue of lawyer well-being in recent years. And thank-goodness for that! We are all very aware of the unfavourable statistics regarding mental health, substance abuse, and the general unhappiness that can show on some faces. So the idea of quantifying these factors — both positive and negative — cited by practitioners seems like a practical piece of work. . . . [more]

Now that I’m a good many years distant from any actual connection to legal education, I feel free to divest myself of a curriculum, or at least an approach to a curriculum, that I’ve mulled over for a long time and that in my view would approach an ideal of sorts.

My notion doesn’t address directly the somewhat tiresome business of skills training vs. theory or doctrine (or whatever the “non-skill” side is now called). I have nothing against skills, which are fine things; I do have some concern, however, that the inculcation of skills that are seen as important . . . [more]

Why are we still discussing Trinity Western University (TWU) and their law school? The Federation of Law Societies of Canada (FLSC) approved TWU’s application back in December and the BC Ministry of Advanced Education gave TWU their approval in January. 

The answer is simple. The FLSC failed to uphold their mandate to act in the public interest when they disengaged from public discourse. This glaring omission became clear to me on Thursday, February 13 as I was live tweeting the first public hearing held by any law society in Canada about TWU.

The Executive Committee of the Nova Scotia Barristers’ . . . [more]