Announcing the 2008 Harvey T. Strosberg Essay Prize Competition

Harvey T. Strosberg, Q.C., Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Class Action Review and Irwin Law Inc. are pleased to announce the fifth annual Harvey T. Strosberg Essay Prize competition. The prize of $10,000 is awarded to an outstanding student paper on Canadian class actions.

The competition is open to all Canadian students enrolled in an undergraduate, graduate, or professional program. The deadline for submissions is March 1, 2008.

For more details see http://www.irwinlaw.com/prize.aspx?prizeid=369 . . . [more]

I have been remiss in pointing out that our big law librarians’ northeast regional conference “NE2007” a.k.a. Libraries Without Borders held in Toronto last month has PowerPoint and audio files available from the Proceedings page on the website.

The University of Toronto has kindly been hosting this for us. We hope to keep the site up indefinitely; the audio recording was kindly paid for with a grant from the AALL/BNA Continuing Education Grants Program and from LLAGNY, the Law Library Association of Greater New York. A copy of the audio will also be made available from the member section of . . . [more]

Some time back I noted briefly that there’d been a conference at Berkeley on law and the emotions. Shortly afterwards I got an email from Dan Kahan, one of the academics involved, pointing me to work done by him and his colleagues on the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale Law School. To quote from the Project’s own description:

The Cultural Cognition Project is a group of scholars from Yale and other universities interested in studying how cultural values shape the public’s risk perceptions and related policy beliefs. Cultural cognition refers to the tendency of individuals to conform their beliefs

Today the Victoria Times Colonist is reporting, courtesy of the CanWest wire, that some professors are banning laptops in their classrooms. This is nice for Slaw, because Colin Galinski is quoted extensively, and his Slaw column that touches on the topic is mentioned.

The story is running on page A2, which is pretty impressive. Of course, it seems to be a bit of a slow news day: the headline on page 1 reads “Game over: Lawn bowlers told to leave ‘valuable’ spot” . . . [more]

This is not hard research or hard law, but it touches on each and it is interesting. It is Democracy 250. In short, a site intended to commemorate 250 years of Parliamentary Democracy in Nova Scotia.

One of the more interesting parts of the site is the Historical Timeline and Learning Resources which include digital copies of original acts, treaties etc drawn from archival collections. Such as the 1758 Act, Relating to the Duties of Import on Rum and other Distilled Liquors. In the timeline one can pick a year and see the documents associated with it.

….in . . . [more]

There’s an article in today’s Globe & Mail on the continued JD-vs-LLB debate, and an email list exchange among Queens alumni gone awry on the subject. This post is not about the article directly, as I’m sure many of Slaw’s readers have already read plenty on the subject. But rather, I have a few questions about statements made within the article. And specifically this passage:

“Canadian law graduates typically spend the same seven years in school before they are granted an LLB but, because of its commonwealth roots, the degree is often confused by international employers with the British LLB.

I’m going to be teaching a first year Property Law course in the winter term, my first for about three years, and thinking to do things differently, I explored the possibility of requiring students to purchase a textbook along with the casebook I’m preparing. There’s a pretty decent text in property law and so I checked: yep, there’s a recent edition. And then — whammo! — the price: $151.

Geez.

I know law books are expensive. The market is, after all, minuscule compared to others. And we can thank our stars that we’re not educating doctors, where book prices approach . . . [more]

If any of those who work in downtown Toronto, especially in the Bay St. area, happen to notice a surprising number of fresh-faced, full-suited types scurrying about today, there is good reason for this: 8am this Monday morning marks the beginning of Interview Week. T.O. firms have the next three days to interview, wine, and dine 2Ls in order to determine which students will get the nod precisely at 5pm on Wednesday, for summer 2008 positions.

It’s perhaps not surprising to know that students stay in touch with each other through the day, both by text message and cell phone . . . [more]

Few lawyers in Canada – I except the wonderful Milt Zwicker – will remember the name of Kline D. Strong who died at the weekend. But he transformed the practice of law in North America.

Kline Duncan Strong 1927 ~ 2007 Kline was born January 23, 1927, in Driggs, Idaho He tried to impress upon his family that you’ve never really experienced work until you’ve hoed sugar beets. His professional education included a CPA/MBA from Northwestern University, a law degree from the University of Colorado and he was the first person to obtain a Ph.D in law office management. He . . . [more]

“You can’t do much without a brain. Decapitation is, in most instances, associated with a decline in IQ.” (my emphasis)

Hmmmm…..

Never mind.

On the other hand (so to speak)

Still, I’m going to assume that the emphasized phase shows that the writer-author of this bon mot has been in court recently. A tip of hat, so to speak. . . . [more]

The James Lewtas Lecture will be delivered today by David Vaver, a former colleague of mine and now Professor of Intellectual Property & IT Law, University of Oxford on the topic “Chocolate, Copyright, Confusion: Intellectual Property and the Supreme Court of Canada”

You can watch David live at 1pm EST — the link will be present on Osgoode’s home page. Or you can catch the archive, the link to which will be available in due course on Osgoode’s Conferences and Seminars page.

David Vaver is an excellent speaker — clear, insightful and witty — and I’d heartily recommend . . . [more]

It’s not often we Canadians get some play on the US legal gossip queen Above the Law, so let’s congratulate McInnes Cooper’s student recruiting video for making the grade.

Law firms are in tough when it comes to online video. The quality standard expected by the average user is that of the nightly news. And the inevitable re-hash of unoriginal legal imagery is a huge block in the road – someone is *always* going to critique your choices.

So isn’t it great to see McInnes Cooper bring this out? A mix of fun & facts, and a shot . . . [more]