Hillary Clinton’s years at Yale Law School shaped her

By MATT STEARNS

McClatchy Newspapers

NEW HAVEN, Conn. | All that Hillary Rodham Clinton would become — all that still inspires her allies and enemies — emerged during her years roaming the Gothic buildings of Yale Law School.

She helped edit a journal that included cartoon police-pigs and that published a self-aggrandizing essay by a Black Panther who had been convicted of murder. Yet she also helped calm a politically inflamed campus.

She nurtured an interest in using the law to aid the needy — especially children — that remains integral to her politics, but which opponents use to pummel her values.

She projected an intelligence that impressed many but that could be cool and intimidating.

She met fellow student Bill Clinton and developed the first stirrings of a unique partnership that has already made American history — and that she hopes will make more.

Read more.

Landry does it again at Montrealer's constitutional law conference

By P.A. Sévigny, The Suburban

With some overblown rhetoric worthy of his now infamous description of the Canadian flag as a “red rag”, former provincial premier and PQ leader Bernard Landry did it again during a recent Quebec City constitutional law conference.

During a heated and sometimes emotional debate about the 1982 repatriation of the British North America Act, Landry paralleled former Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau’s description of Canada’s new constitution to Adolf Hitler’s description of the “1,000-year Reich!” During a speech delivered to law students at the conference, Landry began the quarrel when he quotedthe late Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau as having said “This constitution will last 1,000 years.”

Read the whole article here.

Obama the Law Student

Here's a cool photo of Barack Obama in 1990 when he led the Harvard Law Review.

AMBRIDGE, Mass., Jan. 23 —

By JODI KANTOR

Published: January 28, 2007

The peers who elected Barack Obama as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review say he was a natural leader, an impressive student, a nice guy. But in the 1990 Revue — the graduating editors’ gleeful parody of their elite publication — they said quite a bit more.

“I was born in Oslo, Norway, the son of a Volvo factory worker and part-time ice fisherman,” a mock self-tribute begins. “My mother was a backup singer for Abba. They were good folks.” In Chicago, “I discovered I was black, and I have remained so ever since.”

After his election, the Faux-bama says, he united warring students into “a happy, cohesive folk,” while “empowering all the folks out there in America who didn’t know about me by giving a series of articulate and startlingly mature interviews to all the folks in the media.”

Read the whole interesting article here.

The Average Law Student...After Law School

I am amazed at how many lateral moves amongst former classmates that I have witnessed since graduating from law school. There seem to be very few of them who have remained at their original summer or articling firm. A few have gone overseas. Others have gone in-house. Many others have switched firms, or even gone solo. This after only 3 years! I had expected that many of them would have remained stuck in their articling firm, climbing the partnership ladder. This was the line that we were fed throughout law school, and this was the prevailing attitude during bar admission courses.

I think we are seeing a breakthrough in those prevailing attitudes, with new expectations. I'm not talking about the cliche Generation X or Generation Y attitudes. I am talking about expectations attached to opportunity. Opportunities about, and nobody seems to want to be left behind. A Canadian Law School degree is more than just a road towards a partnership at a major Canadian law firm. The borders are opening up, the 0pportunities to use a legal education in business, government, non-profit, military, and elsewhere are abundant.

Most of my friends are becoming their own man/woman. Law can be a pretty solitary career. There's lots of time to brood about greener pastures. I am letting go of that old addage that says that you should chew your cudd in one field until you can tell whether you like the cudd. That's not to say that I am ready to jump ship. For me, it's about focussing my practice areas, and broadening my skillset to include such things as mediation and arbitration. I am also remembering how much I love to build businesses, and am enjoying those amazing opportunities in running a law firm, a publishing business and an alternate dispute resolution business. It's really fun to grow.

What are you doing with your law degree?

Toronto lawyer fined in cheating scandal

Paid ‘thousands of dollars’ for papers By Robert Todd | Publication Date: Monday, 28 January 2008

A Toronto lawyer was recently fined $10,000 by the Law Society of Upper Canada for selling course work to a York University MBA student for “thousands of dollars.”

Shane Smith was reprimanded by a law society hearing panel last month for conduct unbecoming a student licensee. He was given one year to pay the fine and an additional $1,000 in costs.

According to an agreed statement of facts, Smith acted contrary to parts of the Law Society Act when, while he was an articling student, he “provided and sold papers, which he and another student member had researched and written, to M, who was then a student in the MBA program at York University’s graduate school of business, with the knowledge that the papers would be submitted to the graduate school of business as M’s work.”

The student who received the course work is not named in the statement of facts.
Smith, 31, who currently works for IBM Canada Ltd., was called to the bar in July 2004.

But while the LSUC decision pertains to Smith’s activities while he was articling and M was an MBA student, documents obtained by Law Times show the scandal reached back to their law school days...

Read the whole article here. It never ceases to amaze me what people will risk...their entire career sometimes.

Among the abortionists

Jonathan Kay: Among the abortionists Posted: January 28, 2008, 11:39 AM by Jonathan Kay
National Post: Full Comment

Abortion is the one subject on which otherwise tolerant, open-minded people cannot agree to disagree. If you truly believe that life begins at conception, then what happens in Canada’s abortion clinics and wards approximately 100,000 times every year is, quite literally, a species of genocide. If you take the opposite view — that a fetus is a component of its female host without legal rights or human identity — then your opponents will strike you as nothing but ignorant misogynists. That is why we have precious little “debate” on the subject of abortion. Instead, we have sloganeering by two distinct and mutually hostile ideological tribes.

On Friday, Canada’s pro-choice movement convened what could best be described as a convention of tribal elders — middle-aged and elderly champions of the movement, including Henry Morgentaler, whose victory in the Supreme Court of Canada served to dismantle the entire criminal-law regime surrounding abortion 20 years ago today.

The University of Toronto Law School’s “Symposium to Mark the 20th Anniversary of R. v. Morgentaler” was an odd event. On one hand, it was organized by, and sponsored by, the law school’s own faculty — and so took on the superficial trappings of a normal academic symposium. But since not one of the 15 abortion doctors, scholars, writers and politicians who spoke took a pro-life stand, or even dealt in any serious way with pro-life arguments, the event was actually more of a pro-choice pep rally. On the few occasions when the existence of a pro-life camp was even acknowledged, it was invariably dismissed as a cadre of retrograde zealots plotting to undermine the Charter of Rights and Freedoms...

Read the whole article here, and leave your comments. This is a really interesting topic.

More on the Macleans Rankings

The McGill student newspaper has a good commentary on the Macleans rankings, although they question not only the elements that went into those rankings but the merits of rankings themselves where there are so few law schools.

Most of the criticism that I have read focusses on two considerations: the ranking of faculty by Canadian citations only, and the ranking of students by Lexpert-ranked "elite" firm hiring. Both are, I think, valid criticisms that probably speak to an unfamiliarity with Canadian legal (and Canadian legal academic) culture.

Posted by Russ Brown on October 11, 2007 at 05:17 AM in Law School Issues | Read the entire post here

Faculty of Law | University of Alberta | Faculty Blog

Faculty of Law PhD Program Approved - University of Alberta Faculty of Law

http://www.law.ualberta.ca/News--Events/News.php?news_id=118

The University of Alberta Faculty of Law’s proposal to establish a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Law program was recently approved by Minister of Advanced Education and Technology Doug Horner, further enhancing the Faculty’s reputation as a top-tier national law school.

Prior to approval, the program proposal went through a rigorous process including an internal review where the program received overwhelming approval from the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research Council, the Academic Standards Committee, and the Academic Planning Committee. The Campus Alberta Quality Council—an arms-length quality assurance agency that makes recommendations on applications from post-secondary institutions seeking to offer new degree programs in Alberta—then reviewed the proposal and made the recommendation to Minister Horner.

The PhD program will give candidates a unique opportunity to study select areas of law in considerable detail. Involved in a wide range of leading legal research, faculty members can supervise graduate students in many subject areas including the Faculty’s well-known strengths in health law, corporate/commercial law, public international law, aboriginal law, criminal law, and legal theory.

More information on the program will be released shortly.

Answer expected next month on LU's law school proposal

Tb News Source
Web Posted: 1/24/2008 7:32:10 PM

Lakehead University has moved one step closer to establishing what could be the seventh law school in the province if their proposal for the former Port Arthur Collegiate Institute is successful.

LU has re-submitted its proposal to the Law Society of Upper Canada hoping to get approval for a new school that would house 150 students once it was fully operational.

Lakehead University President Fred Gilbert said Thursday the re-submission was requested by the Law Society which asked for more details on proposed course information. Gilbert says he expects the new proposal will be up for consideration in February.

An audit shows that close to $4 million worth of renovations is required at the PACI and if approval is granted, the school could be operational by fall of 2009.

David Asper founds Centre for Constitutional Rights with $7.5 million gift

Recent alumnus David Asper (LLM '07) has made a $7.5 million gift to the law school to establish the David Asper Centre for Constitutional Rights. David's gift is the largest contribution ever made by an individual to a law school in Canada. It will have a transformative effect on educational opportunities for students at our law school, and will play a vital role in articulating Canada's constitutional vision to the broader world.

Read the press release (PDF)

Read a brief biography of David Asper (PDF)

Watch the announcement of the gift at a special event held at the law school

This guy is amazing!

The need to change constantly

I never knew how important it would be to be flexible as a sole practitioner lawyer. The market is constantly changing. One day, there is a great need for litigation. The next, it is a strong real estate market. The next, people are dying, and everybody remembers that they need a will. The next, people are on fire to start up companies and need a lawyer to get them started. The next, companies are buying each other out, merging, or liquidating. The next day, forclosures are the big thing.

I am learning, with some time and effort, that it is impossible to keep up, and the the importance of choosing some key areas of focus. I have started to narrow my focus areas, and it is feeling good. I am attracting a broader client base as a result, and am able to provide better service to those key area clients.

At first, I was afraid that I would have to try to be everything to everybody, but I have learned that this is impossible, and not economically or chronologically feasible. It is too hard to start from scratch from one file to the next. I am appreciating the feeling of developing a particular expertise in the areas of real estate, wills and estates and divorce law. These are to become the bread and butter of our practice. I am also focussing a lot of time on mediation and arbitration training and marketing. Focus is good. Focus is safer. Focus is financially sound.

Law school for Seagram site?

Proposal being floated among RIM co-CEO, Laurier, UW

TheRecord.com
January 11, 2008
TAMSIN MCMAHON
RECORD STAFF
WATERLOO

The former Seagram lands in downtown Waterloo are being touted as a potential location for a proposed law school.

Jim Balsillie, co-chief executive officer of Research In Motion, has been in talks with both the University of Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier University about a potential partnership to open a law school on the site at Erb and Caroline streets, said John English.

Read more...

Becoming a Mediator and Arbitrator

I'm sorry that I haven't posted in a while. Christmas kept me really busy with family committments.

Then, in the New Year, I decided to become accredited as a mediator and an arbitrator, so I have been really busy with that. It's an exciting new development in my legal career. I'll write more about it soon, as you may find it interesting or inspiring.

ADR (Alternative Dispute Resolution) has become a lot more mainstream in the last 15 years or so, and continues to make inroads with the public, the courts, and with lawyers. More on that later.