Occasionally a single appointment can signal everything. Today, Harvard Law School Dean Elena Kagan announced the long-awaited replacement for Harry S. Martin, who has been director of the Harvard law Library ((Which is the most extraordinary law library I’ve ever used, with due apologies to Ruth at the Bodleian and David at the Great Library)) for 27 years. Martin’s contribution deserves a post in its own right for his service as Henry N. Ess III Librarian and Professor of Law at the Law School and his seminars on Art and the Law.

But let’s focus on the new . . . [more]

A companion piece to my recent post on the various sites under consideration: the Law Society of Upper Canada has approved Lakehead University in Thunder Bay as a site for a new law school, Ontario’s seventh. The Toronto Star editorial points out that:

[b]efore it can be launched, the Lakehead law school still needs to win approval from the Federation of Law Societies of Canada and from the provincial ministry of colleges and universities.

It also suggests that there is already a sufficiency of lawyer-producing ventures in the province and in a stupid comparison tells its readers that we have . . . [more]

I received an interesting submission to lawblogs.ca last night. Solo in Ontario: Criminal Practice is written by Bo Arfai, a 2008 call with the unenviable position of going solo post-articling. After a brief email conversation, I advised him to get some profile & contact information up on his blog, which should be in place shortly.

What I find interesting is that he’s blogging from a very human perspective. In a world where many of us consider both articling and the early years of practice in ‘big firm’ context, I have to think Bo’s immediate future & choices are a more . . . [more]

Dalhousie law prof, Philip Gerard, has an enjoyable piece on The Court today in which he shades his eyes and does a tour d’horizon in search of a replacement for Justice Bastarache.

Herewith an excerpt to whet your appetite:

That leaves Nova Scotia, but it has to be said in all honesty that the province is not bursting with Supreme Court-calibre talent at the moment. Don’t get me wrong: there are lots of highly competent and professional judges sitting on the Nova Scotia bench. But the bar for the Supreme Court is higher than that. If you are looking

Apparently the University of Chicago Law School has stopped giving students access to the internet in classrooms, at least on an “experimental basis,” according to the Dean. Inside Higher Ed has the story on the situation, first broken by the blog Above The Law. Students are not happy about it, according to reports.

This seems to be the first time a law school has shut off wireless connectivity as a matter of policy.

I’ve just finished teaching a law school course and I’d have to say that, looked at from the other side, there are few if any good . . . [more]

Adam Kolber, who teaches law at the University of San Diego School of Law, and who is currently teaching at Princeton University, studies neuroethics. You might well ask. Well, folks have always been trying to mess with our heads one way or another — just ask any of my students — and now there needs to be some greater discussion of ethical standards to hamper, if not to restrain, some of the more enthusiastic and direct neural intruders. And we need to think about how to understand and use what we’re learning about neural functioning.

His blog, the Neuroethics . . . [more]

What Cornell manages to accomplish in library-based legal education is definitely the most arresting and challenging aspect of what I’ve learned here. They outline their activities on their teaching page. . . . [more]

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School is celebrating its 10th year. Wow! They have been holding a series of events including distinguished speakers, book releases and the like, including the talk by Clay Shirky we previously noted. The whole thing culminates with “The Future of the Internet” conference on May 15 & 16, 2008. There will also be a gala the evening of May 16th. The Agenda looks stellar. . . . [more]

The first video gaming research symposium at the University of Toronto will be taking place as follows:

Tuesday May 13th 2008
8 am – 4 pm

40 St. George Street
Bahen Centre for Information and Technology
University of Toronto
Room 1190

Video gaming incorporates and impacts cutting edge research in the fields of computer science, engineering, sociology, management and law. We are delighted to present a broad array of research projects that are representative of the breadth of work underway at the University of Toronto.

The presentations will focus on the technical aspects of video game design and then consider

Back in the 70s, then Professor ((pre Dean and pre President)) Harry Arthurs touted Osgoode Hall as the best law school in the Commonwealth.

I’ve just read an extraordinary newsletter from Oxford which lists such an extraordinary range of academic, comparative and pro-bono activities that I wonder whether any other law school could match it.

Whether this is due to the new (Canadian) Dean of the Faculty Timothy Endicott (whom we have saluted before) or just that for the first time, the whole seems larger than its collegiate parts, but page after page manifests intellectual energy and engagement.

And . . . [more]

Tscript.com is in the business of putting litigation transcripts online and so making them accessible at any time from anywhere. It seems that sometimes when a public body holds an inquiry the transcripts are made generally available on Tscript, something I discovered when I was exploring the Ipperwash Inquiry. Every word in a transcript is indexed and linked to the pages where it occurs, the index appearing in a frame to the left of the document. (This might make searching awkward, depending on your browser; Safari searches both the text and the index; but if you have difficulty, you’ll . . . [more]

For all you law and IT lovers, I am pleased to announce that Leg@l.IT is back this year! With Canada’s Privacy Commissionner, Jennifer Stoddart, and Prof. Pierre Trudel as co-presidents, three tracks with the most interesting and en vogue subjects (here is the agenda) and an impressive group of speakers, including fellow Slawers (Simon Chester, Jordan Furlong and Vincent Gautrais) and blogger (David Bilinsky), it is THE event you don’t want to miss!

Leg@l.IT is an accessible and spearheading conference, the most important of this kind in Canada, about the potential and . . . [more]