The Ontario Justice Education Network (or OJEN) last week celebrated 5 years of developing and delivering justice education in collaboration with educators, judges and justices of the peace, lawyers, court staff, community members and other justice sector volunteers around Ontario. There was a write-up about the celebration on the Law Society of Upper Canada website. OJEN has a wide range of programs to encourage students to learn about the justice system, including their signature program Courtrooms & Classrooms which brings students into court to explain proceedings to them. They have really expanded their repertoire since their inception.

Congratulations, OJEN . . . [more]

So the Hogwarts’ Headmaster was. So much for innocence. In a pre-wired, pre-web connected world, would it have mattered? Will this effect sales? Will there be be some re-enactments of Fahrenheit 451? Celsius 232.78 doesn’t quite have the same ring. Or class actions commenced by entrepreneurial legalists seeing the return of their clients’ ill-obtained shekels? Or alleging intentional or reckless or at least negligent infliction of mental suffering on the sensitive souls nurtured in the gentility of NASCAR ?

Off to more important matters. I think I can add to the discussion that Barbara Johnson has started in her Slaw . . . [more]

I attended an amazing session today at NE2007. In “Reveille! Roll Call!: Communicating Our Value to Management,” Steven Lastres (Director of Library & Knowledge Management, Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, New York) and Donna Purvis (Firmwide Library Manager, Morrison & Foerster LLP, San Francisco) energized me by discussing practical examples of what researchers/librarians can do to contribute to our organizations’ bottom lines. Some best practices discussed:

• Learn about your organization’s business goals and objectives.
• Find out what your organization’s leaders are saying about the firm in the media, trade publications, etc.
• Use the same language as your firm when promoting

We’ve posted here before about virtual education and the use of the internet to deliver classes. In that vein, the Freakonomics blog yesterday published an interview with an instructor offering online economics courses to community colleges and other small private colleges. From his home in Chicago, he teaches courses across the country.

The teacher, Jamie Gladfelter, highlights a few of the benefits of going online with courses – of course, this interview is great PR for him, so you wouldn’t expect it any other way. As usual at their blog, the comments are quite insightful, with Gladfelter himself coming . . . [more]

A few quick hits today as I’ve ushered 174 law students, mostly first years, through database training this week, and I’m nearing the end of my brain being productive.

I always find it interesting to observe the students during these training sessions to see how they relate to the technology. This year I noticed two interesting things. Firstly, in our training area the students can open either Firefox or Explorer and for the last few years when asked to open a browser Firefox has more often than not been their browser of choice. Not so this year, this year I . . . [more]

The University of California, Berkeley announced today that it is posting the lectures from courses on YouTube.

“YouTube’s ongoing innovations create a great environment in which students and lifelong learners alike can discover, watch and share educational videos,” said Ben Hubbard, ETS co-manager of webcast.berkeley. “We are excited to make UC Berkeley videos available to the world on YouTube and will continue to expand our offerings.”

At the moment the offerings on the Berkeley Channel are mostly science courses, and there’s no law yet. A couple of the more accessible offerings include PACS 164A: Introduction to Nonviolence – Fall 2006 . . . [more]

Three interesting items in the inbox today, each of which reflects a different facet of the many forces hard at work on producing imminent changes to the profession.

First comes news from the ABA’s Law School Admissions Council that the number of applications to U.S. law schools dropped in 2006 by 7.6%, the second straight annual decrease on top of a sharp deceleration in 2004 in the longstanding trend of rising admissions. The linked article focuses on the drop in both applications and admissions among women, and properly so. But many of the reasons for the decrease cited in the . . . [more]

Ontario Law Schools are being introduced to EASElaw, a Career Services software product of eCampusRecruiter.ca. It looks like in addition to EASElaw there is EASEmba (is EASEmd on the horizon?). EASE stands for Electronic Applications for Students and Employers.

The product is being pitched to current law students as an information management tool; just this week Queen’s Law launched EASElaw (the Q’s log in screen is here: nice crest) in order to bring some order to the On Campus Interview (OCI) process.

Students have been asked to register with EASElaw in order to access their customized schedule of . . . [more]

Freakonomics Blog (which I read less and less now that the RSS feed serves up only excerpts, thanks to the NY Times) points me to a paper accepted for publication in the upcoming issue of the Journal of Legal Education. Douglas Rush and Hisako Matsuo examine ((

Does Law School Curriculum Affect Bar Examination Passage? An Empirical Analysis of the Factors Which Were Related to Bar Examination Passage between 2001 and 2006 at a Midwestern Law School , full paper available in PDF

))whether success or failure on the Missouri bar exam is correlated to the courses taken by a . . . [more]

Maclean’s has released its first ranking of Canadian law schools. The magazine’s choices for the top law faculties I’ll leave till later in this post, because there are rather more interesting things going on here.

Let’s first look at the methodology. The schools are ranked equally on faculty quality (50%) and graduate quality (50%), the latter broken down into elite firm hiring (25%), national reach (15%) and Supreme Court clerkships (10%). Here’s the ranking’s director, Professor Brian Leiter of the University of Texas at Austin Faculty of Law, speaking about the breakdowns: . . . [more]

On Thursday, August 16, the Chancellor of the University of California at Irvine offered Duke University constitutional law scholar Erwin Chemerinsky the job of dean at UC-Irvine’s brand new law school. Less than a week later he called Chemerinsky to withdraw the offer. It seems that the short-term dean’s politics were too left for the regents of the university, something they seem to have discovered only after the reaction by some conservative elements (donors?) to an op-ed piece by Chemerinsky in the Los Angeles Times criticizing the Bush administration.The Washington Post has the story.

Who of any scholarly merit . . . [more]

Have you registered yet for the 4th Northeast Regional Law Libraries Meeting (NE2007)?? Time is running out!

Our theme is Libraries Without Borders 2, and it is gearing up to be THE outstanding law library learning, networking, must-attend event for 2007. Just a few of the many highlights:

• A grand opening reception at the Legislative Building at Queen’s Park. This is home to the Ontario Legislative Assembly, and an impressive building built in 1893, surrounded by park and University of Toronto campus.
• Keynote by Michael Ignatieff, internationally renowned academic, journalist, commentator, intellectual, and specialist in human rights