All Posts Tagged With: "law school"
Lawyer calls for another new law school
We’ve heard of the rural shortage. But a suburban shortage?
Photo by Ian Barrett for Maclean's
Just months after British Columbia opened its first new law school in 30 years, a top lawyer is advocating for another one, this time in Surrey.
B.C.’s newest law school is at Thomson Rivers University in Kamloops, where its mission is, in part, to address the rural lawyer shortage.
Tony Wilson, an adjuct professor at Simon Fraser University, makes the argument that there’s a pending shortage in suburban Surrey too. He notes that the city near Vancouver is projected to be the biggest in B.C. by 2020. Surrey grew by 13.6 per cent between 2001 and 2006.
There’s plenty of work, Wilson argues in his letter to Canadian Lawyer. “Surery has… clients, many of them in real estate, real estate development, or other small or medium-sized businesses,” he says, “and if you’re into criminal law, the newspapers would suggest that opportunities abound.”
The 2011 Maclean’s Law School Rankings
From the 2011 Maclean’s Professional Schools Issue
Are a law school’s professors significant contributors to the intellectual life of their discipline? Do a law school’s graduates land the most sought-after jobs in government, the private sector and academia? These are the two questions Maclean’s annual law survey seeks to answer.
All of the data used in the Maclean’s law rankings are publicly available. All focus on law school outputs. Fifty per cent of the overall ranking is determined by faculty quality, and 50 per cent by graduate quality.
The four measures of graduate quality look at the success each law school has had producing graduates able to land the most competitive jobs. The indicators are:
Elite Firm Hiring: Maclean’s calculated how many of each school’s graduates are serving as associates at law firms on Lexpert’s list of the largest firms in Canada across all regions, or at one of the five leading New York firms, according to the employment website Vault. This was done by examining the online biographies of thousands of lawyers at dozens of law firms. To scale this measure to each school, the tally was divided by first-year class size, averaged over the past three years. This measure is worth 20 per cent.
National Reach: This indicator, based on the Elite Firm Hiring measure, is worth 10 per cent. It measures the proportion of each law school’s grads at leading firms who are working at firms other than the three that hired the most grads from this school. It’s a measure of the extent to which leading firms outside a school’s region hire its graduates.
Supreme Court Clerkships: A measure of how many of a school’s graduates have served as clerks at the Supreme Court of Canada, this indicator is worth 10 per cent. There are 27 clerks each year; it is one of the most competitive positions open to graduates. Maclean’s looked at the last six years’ worth of clerks. As with the other measures of graduate quality, the tally was divided by each school’s average first-year enrolment.
Faculty Hiring: Worth 10 per cent, this indicator looks at how many of a school’s graduates are professors at Canadian law schools, with extra weight given to grads hired by faculties other than their alma mater.
Faculty Journal Citations: In this measure of faculty quality, worth 50 per cent, Maclean’s employed the HeinOnline database of legal periodicals. The search included citations in international publications as well as Canadian journals in order to reflect the reality of a globalized academy. The number of citations recorded by each faculty member was measured; the tally for each school was then divided by the size of its faculty.
The methodology behind the Maclean’s law school rankings was created in co-operation with professor Brian Leiter, director of the Center for Law, Philosophy, and Human Values at the University of Chicago. The data were compiled by researcher Jane Bao. Ranking on each indicator and overall rank was determined using the statistical percentile method that Maclean’s has long employed in our annual university rankings. Our statistician was Hong Chen, of McDougall Scientific Ltd. statistical consultants.
Goodbye Bay Street. Hello Humboldt.
From the 2011 Maclean’s Professional Schools Issue
Photograph by Nayan Sthankiya
Click here for our 2011 Law School Rankings
When she was in law school, Amber Biemans always figured she’d practise in the city. After she and her husband had kids, though, she felt the pull of small-town life. At age 26, Biemans joined a firm in Humboldt, Sask. (population 5,900); two years later, she’d bought out a senior partner at the firm who was ready to retire. Making partner at age 28 was an “amazing opportunity,” says Biemans, now 32, but beyond that, “the benefits here are immense,” from the commute to work—which takes all of five minutes—to the close relationships she’s built with clients.
Former sex worker found dead
Wendy Babcock was advocate for safer sex work
Wendy Babcock, a prostitue-turned-law school student, has been found dead at the age of 32 in her Toronto home.
Babcock gained attention in 2009 after she progressed from homeless teenage prostitute to advocate for safer sex work and then to law student at York University’s Osgoode Hall Law School.
A police spokesperson said there were no signs of foul play, reports the Toronto Star.
Babcock had attempted suicide on several occasions.
Among her achievements was the founding of a group that compiles information on bad sex work clients and her work with Street Health, which prompted an award from former Toronto mayor David Miller.
Babcock was raised in an abusive home and began selling sex at age 15. Her work forced her to give up her son to social services. Eventually, she quit prostitution and attended George Brown College. After succeeding there, she gained admission to Osgoode Hall, despite not having the required university credits. She had successfully completed the first two years of the four-year degree when she was found dead.
Asking for transcripts isn’t a rights violation
Failure was law school’s fault for not accommodating my chronic pain: student
A University of Windsor law graduate has had her Ontario Human Rights Complaint dismissed.
Anica Visic accused the law firm Elia Associates, where she articled in 2007, of discrimination after boss Patricia Elia asked to see a full transcript of her grades several weeks into her job with the firm — and then fired her. Visic had previously submitted only unofficial grades.
The full transcripts showed that Visic failed her first year of school in 2000 — a fact that she blamed on the University of Windsor, which she alleged failed to properly accommodate her disability. Visic said she suffered from pain in her arms, shoulders, upper back and neck, which made writing difficult. Windsor allowed her to repeat her first year, but didn’t expunge the failed courses.
Visic was dismissed from her job for her uncooperative behaviour — not because she had failed, Elia told the Windsor Star. “She made our staff cry. She was argumentative. Clients didn’t want to work with her.” Elia recommended to the Upper Canada Law Society that Visic article for at least six more months before writing her bar exam.
Ontario announces first new law school in 42 years
Aboriginal and Northern students preferred
Photo courtesy of steakpinball on Flickr
Canada’s lawyer shortage might finally start to improve. Ontario announced yesterday that it will fund the first new law school to be built in the province in more than 42 years. Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ont. received $1.5-million in funding and hopes to enroll students by 2013.
The new school will be the seventh in Ontario and the first-ever in northern Ontario. The only other new law school announced for Canada since the 1980s is the one under construction at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, B.C., which will take its first 40 students in September.
Lakehead president Brian Stevenson said he aims to start with 55 students in 2013, but will accept up to 150 students after three years. The program will have a strong focus on aboriginal law, rural and remote practice, plus natural resource management — all specialties that cater to northern Ontario’s economy. The university will give preference to northern residents and aboriginal applicants.
Student sues law school over employment stats
Grad alleges she was misled her about chances of working as an attorney
A graduate of a law school in San Diego, Calif. has filed a class action law suit because she says her university, The Thomas Jefferson School of Law, knowingly misrepresented the likelihood that graduates would find work as lawyers. ”For more than 15 years, TJSL has churned out graduates, many of whom have little or no hope of working as attorneys at any point in their careers,” Anna Alaburda wrote in her complaint, according to The National Law Journal. Alaburda, who has $150,000 in student loans, says she chose TJSL because statistics reported in U.S. News & World Report said that 80 per cent of its graduates were employed after nine months. She writes that she “reasonably assumed” that meant full-time work as attorneys — until she learned that the school includes part-time and non-legal jobs in the figures. TJSL’s website continues to use similar statistics. They say 85 per cent of students from the 2009 class were employed, but they don’t say where. In Canada, there is little likelihood of similar law suits, as self-regulation has created a shortage of attorneys, rather than a surplus.
Want to be a lawyer? Better behave yourself
A new campaign cracks down on lawyers who are rude and aggressive — with clients or even in their private lives
Photograph by Aaron Vincent Elkaim
Young, ambitious and intelligent, Ryan Manilla was, by almost all accounts, on the road to becoming a first-rate lawyer. He excelled at Osgoode Hall Law School, graduating in the top 10 per cent of his class. He won a summer job in the New York City offices of Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg, one of Canada’s leading firms. In 2009, he completed his articles with Pinkofskys in Toronto, where he intended to practise criminal law.
But in September, Manilla’s career came to a crashing halt. The Law Society of Upper Canada (LSUC), which regulates Ontario’s lawyers and paralegals, denied his application to join the profession, based on its ages-old “good character” requirement. (Manilla’s appeal was heard last week, and a decision is pending.) It wasn’t a strictly professional issue that convinced the law society panel to bar Manilla—it was the young man’s dealings with his condominium board.
Canadian law societies have required lawyers to be “of good character” virtually as long as the profession has been regulated, but it’s rare for someone to be barred because his character was found lacking. Even the meaning of “good character” can be a little bit hazy: it isn’t defined in the Law Society Act, but it’s been described as having a strong moral fibre, a belief the law must be upheld, and an appreciation of the difference between right and wrong. The law society can wield that requirement to decide who gets to be a lawyer—and sometimes, who doesn’t, as the Manilla case shows.
In 2008, as board president, Manilla became embroiled in a dispute over an increase in condo fees, which he opposed. After sending unsavoury emails to his fellow condo board members suggesting they ran “the risk of being shot by residents,” he was replaced as president, but stayed on the board and continued to fight the proposed fee hike, boasting that he got a thrill out of making other members “squirm.” That December, Manilla forged a letter from a woman claiming to be a private investigator, making up allegations of kickbacks and other wrongdoing among board members—something the law society panel deemed “character assassination.”
In March 2009, Manilla, then 27, was charged with four counts of criminal harassment; further charges followed of intimidating a witness, threatening death, and failing to comply with an undertaking given to a police officer. In June, all charges were dropped after Manilla met certain conditions. He sold his condo, apologized to targeted board members, and made a donation of $250 to the SickKids Foundation in their names. But not enough time had passed, the law society panel ruled, to ensure Manilla was of “good character” and deserved to join the profession. In fact, he’d confessed to falsifying the letter just five days before his hearing.
Manilla certainly offended the members of his condo board and behaved in unscrupulous ways, but whether this should bar him from the legal profession is harder to say. “Can we have a good lawyer, and a bad person?” says Lorne Sossin, dean of Osgoode Hall Law School at York University. “Is the law society required to govern virtue in its members? It’s a tough question.”
Manitoba incentive programs aren’t about students
New programs for medical and law students are about getting professionals where they’re needed, not student aid
This summer, Dawson City, the second largest community in the Yukon, lost half its doctors when one of them decided to take a year-long sabbatical. The territorial government is currently building a hospital in the town, since the 1960s anyone who has to be held overnight for medical treatment has to be airlifted to Whitehorse, but many in the community question who’s actually going to work there.
Whitehorse, home to the territory’s only hospital, is facing a severe and growing doctor shortage and specialists only pass through a few times a year. Serious cases requiring emergency specialist care must be sent south, usually to Vancouver.
Throughout Northern Canada the story is the same: shortages of doctors and other professionals, like lawyers.
Certainly, there is a shortage of doctors throughout much of the country but not having a family doctor is one thing when there are hospitals and walk-in clinics nearby; it’s a whole different story when the nearest doctor–of any sort–is a several hundred kilometre flight away.
Manitoba recently introduced programs designed to encourage graduates of medicine and law to work in the province’s North, by giving them tuition refunds in exchange for work in isolated communities.
This isn’t about student aid, it’s about providing incentives to encourage grads to work in places that need their skills.
Some have criticized these programs on the basis that they put pressure on poorer students to work in the North, rather than pursue specialties. While I understand that some people have a sort of moral objection to student debt, if there are any graduates who can handle debt it’s medical specialists who will graduate to high salaries.
Medical students, just by the virtue of being medical students, have access to large loans and lines of credit. Banks are willing to lend because medical students are essentially guaranteed high salaries on graduation.
This new program doesn’t pressure students from poorer backgrounds into choosing the North over a specialty, it gives students a choice between paying off their debt by pursuing higher paying positions or working off their debt by practicing in areas where there is a great need.
If we want to talk about inequality, let’s talk about the fact that the far majority of medical students come from well-off backgrounds. At the Université de Montréal a full 45 per cent of medical students have backgrounds in the richest 20 per cent of the population, only five per cent come from poor backgrounds. The problem isn’t how medical students from poor backgrounds choose to pay off their debts, it’s about getting them in to medical school in the first place.
Or we can talk about the fact that Northern Canadians–a large percentage of whom are Aboriginal–are denied essential government services provided to southerners because few people want to provide them.
Let’s remember that medical education, while it may be expensive, is still funded by society, there’s nothing wrong with the state encouraging doctors to do the right thing and provide medical care to Canadians whose access to proper treatment is severely limited.
Other provinces with large northern regions would be wise to imitate these programs and the federal government should do the same for the territories.
A problem with free education
Post-grad obligations for medical students could create a two-tiered system
Is free education worth the years of service students are obliged to pay back? In the past couple of months, two grant programs have emerged in Manitoba with the aim of delivering access to key services in otherwise under-serviced parts of the province.
Both medical students and law students will now be able to apply for grants that will pay for the majority of their education. In return, though, they must spend their first years as doctors or lawyers in remote areas of the province, where access to legal and medical services is hard to attain.
While the government’s and the universities’ hearts are in the right place for wanting to help residents with accessibility issues while helping students graduate debt-free, I have to wonder if the deal will seem worthwhile once students are graduated and working through their contracts. How many students will have to give up great opportunities elsewhere to fulfill their educational obligations?
A program like this can very easily make it more difficult for low-income students to become big players in their field.
For example, if a student takes advantage of Manitoba’s medical grant program to its full extent, they will have paid for a huge portion of their education, but owe two-and-a-half years of service as soon as they finish their residency.
A student who finishes their undergraduate degree at the age of 22, finishes medical school at 26, could very well be over 30 before they finish their residency and begin paying back their time to the province.
A kid with a dream of becoming a thoracic surgeon — a highly-competitive position — will end up taking a break of nearly three years at the exact moment they are eligible to begin applying for jobs in their field. Instead, they’ll spend that time in the outback practicing family medicine. Meanwhile, their peers from wealthier backgrounds who did not require the government’s help to go through school will leapfrog into those jobs.
Family medicine changes lives. It provides extraordinarily valuable services to everyday people. There is also a significant doctor shortage in rural areas and that’s a problem that needs to be addressed. But programs like this, if not properly monitored, could end up creating a two-tiered healthcare system, one where wealthy students get the choice jobs, and poorer students make do with what’s left after their service has been repaid.
Law school not worth it?
Due to costs and tight labour market, going to law school may not pay off for a large number of students
The problem with having a two-week Christmas break right after exams is that the holiday comes smack in the middle of post-first-year-midterm malaise. Accordingly, when very well-meaning people would ask me how law school was going, my answer was usually any or all of me bursting into tears, straight up walking away while mumbling or looking them straight in the eye and saying something like “It’s totally not worth it.”
Apparently, had I wanted to back up my overly-emotional sentiment with some facts, I could have appealed to a rather unlikely ally: The American Bar Association.
Hidden deep on their website is this little four-page PDF gem that basically says that for almost half the people who go to law school, it’s totally not worth it to go to law school:
The combination of the rising cost of a legal education and the realities of the legal job market mean that going to law school may not pay off for a large number of law students.
Here are some of the most uplifting statistics (all American, by the way):
- The average public law student borrows $71,436 for law school
- The average private school student borrows $91,506
- Most American public law schools raised tuition this year by 10 to 25 per cent to make up for funding shortfalls
- In 2009, 42 per cent of law school grads had starting salaries of less than $65,000/year
It’s hard to argue with statistics, especially ones that paint a picture devoid of all sunshine. It’s also doubtlessly true that any potential students, law or otherwise, should do their research before applying and enrolling. But I still find the whole thing to be a little eyebrow raising.
For one, I’ve yet to meet a law student who did no research and simply applied to school because they thought a JD was some kind of golden ticket that would get them the super awesome apartment they saw on The Good Wife. It’s kind of insulting to potential law students, all of whom have financed at least one degree somehow, to be like “Spoiler alert, people: Law school is expensive.”
Moreover, it’s strange to me that the American Bar Association itself seems to be of the opinion that a law degree’s sole worth is grounded in its future earning potential. I know I gripe a lot about law school, but every day there is something that makes it worth it, and it has nothing to do with an imagined salary five years down the road. Law school is an aspirational gambit, and for nobody I know is the end game money. It’s also really hard, and I don’t believe you’d make it if the only thing pulling you through was the prospect of 50 Bentleys in the West Indies.
There are lots of good reasons for going, though, and it’s strange to me that those have all been skipped over in this little tome. Law school is full of interesting people and fascinating new facts and whole new worlds of things to become passionate about and people to be nerdy about learning around, not to mention a world of future careers at all kinds of pay grades. Maybe the ABA should spend a little more time advocating for that, or, heaven forbid, advocating for the cost of a legal education to go down a bit.
The exam crazies
I forgot to bring my book. To the open book exam. To the only exam that actually counted.
There are all kinds of scenarios you see frequently where seemingly otherwise-normal people go completely insane: sporting riots, Black Friday, anytime free food is introduced into a newsroom. In the past, upon viewing these events, I would think to myself “Self, in such a situation, you would not succumb to the crazies. You would likely rise above the desire to go nuts about something that doesn’t matter.”
Then I went through first-year law school exams, upon which I learned that I am apparently completely the kind of person who goes batty when faced with things that mostly don’t matter and even more insane when faced with something that does.
At UVic, the 1Ls had six exams in a 12-day period: Each Monday, Wednesday and Friday for two weeks. Here’s the thing: Five of those exams didn’t count. Not technically, anyway. At UVic, the year-long courses all have midterms from which the grade will only count if it’s better than the grade you get on your final. These are dubbed “help, not hurt” exams, a moniker I take issue with having gone through the “help, not hurt” exam period.
I stopped exercising. I stopped eating. I didn’t consciously try to stop sleeping, but I did anyway. For two weeks, no matter what time I went to bed, I would wake up hourly, occasionally actually sitting bolt upright, with my brain a jumble of different law-related thoughts. Not even fully formed thoughts, either, so it’s not like these nocturnal interruptions were helpful. It was only ever just little, unconnected fragments of thoughts from all seven of my classes.
Offer, acceptance, consideration…Multiple Access v. McCutcheon…trespass torts…three doctrinal requirements to complete a gift…Oakes test…
Et cetera. On a loop. Every night for two weeks.
Of course, there was one exam that did count. Our Law, Legislation and Policy course was only half a year, so the December exam was the final, the one that one prof described as “just hurt.” And, of course, it was for that exam that I did the craziest thing I did in all of the two-week exam period, possibly ever.
I forgot to bring my book. To the open book exam. To the only exam that actually counted.
Considering my panic level at any given point in those two weeks was generally situated at around a 7, the discovery that I would have to write a three-hour final that actually counted without my coursebook (which, by the way, is where I made all my notes) almost caused a stroke. Which is a really great physical and mental place to be in, by the way, just before you write an exam.
The only good thing to say about this is that once my blood started flowing again and I emitted a sound not unlike a cat being strangled, literally everyone around me who figured out what had happened to me simultaneously reached with their one hand to their own book and with their other hand to their wallet to get out their copy card so that I could run to the library and copy as much of their book as I could before the exam. Seriously, there were like 8 different people performing the exact same motion, some of whom I don’t even really know. It was a balletic example of the kindness and generosity of UVic law students. It was actually really heartwarming.
Of course, it also didn’t change how screwed I was. I’ll spare you the details, but suffice it to say it did not go well. Try and at least learn from me, anyone who is reading this, to check your backpack twice before leaving for an exam so that some good might come of this. And if you have any tips on how to better survive the next exam period — the one in April that actually all counts — please, for the love of Christmas, pass them on.
A whole new kind of legal brief
Thanks, Diesel, for being the first-ever entity to induce library fantasies in sleep-deprived law students.
Some students at Brooklyn Law School are all a-twitter about the fact that their law library serves as the backdrop for a new racy ad campaign for Diesel that features law books far less prominently than it does the underwear-clad derrieres of models. (That link falls just south of NSFW.)
“It’s gross. I work on those computers every day!” fumed a female student, referring to a shot showing two bra- and panty-clad women climbing over the machines toward an open-mouthed man.
“Ugh. The library fantasies are now relentless.”
Right. Thanks, Diesel, for being the first-ever entity to induce library fantasies in sleep-deprived law students. Now we’ll never get any work done!
I don’t really see what the big deal is. I assume most people looking at the photos aren’t pulling out their magnifying glasses to see what law texts the half-naked people are crawling over, and there’s no indication of the school’s name in the photos as far as I can see. As far as I can tell, the school is just getting a boatload of free publicity out of this and the students there have a fun story to tell to their friends at other law schools.
But if they’re really that worked up about it, the folks at Diesel may want to consider winging their way across the continent to the UVic Law Library if they need a new backdrop for their next ad campaign. I can only assume that is exactly what these chairs, which are spread liberally through the library, were designed for.
Windsor law did not discriminate
Law school fights back against charges of racism and sexism in dean hiring process
The University of Windsor has issued a response to charges of racial and sexual discrimination lodged against it by failed dean of law candidate Emily Carasco, saying that she “lacked sufficient scholarly gravitas.”
Although Carasco claims that she was the best of the two failed short-listed candidates, the university has responded saying she actually scored below the other candidate, Scott Fairley (who is a white man), “despite being granted extra points due to her gender and self-identification as a visible minority,” according to a report by the National Post.
The search committee, which is staffed by a number of women and members of visible minorities, received mostly negative feedback on Carasco according to the university’s response, including statements that she would be “a disruptive and divisive force” and “would condemn the law school to years of acrimony, division and dysfunction.”
In a totally non-disruptive move, Carasco has asked that the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario stop the school’s search for a new dean and appoint her to the position instead. She is also seeking $60,000 from the school for “injury to dignity” and $15,000 from colleague Richard Moon who, she alleges, sabotaged her candidacy.
The university’s response indicates that the search committee’s final vote showed two in favour of Carasco, one in favour of Fairley, and eight for neither. The HRTO has said it will not interfere in the new dean of law selection (after asserting it could, if it wanted to) and the university continues to look for a new dean.
It takes a little more than law school
What you have to do on top of your degree, bar exam and articling to become a lawyer
We’ve all heard of the bar exam and articling (essentially an internship) as steps potential lawyers have to take before they can actually start working but every province also requires law graduates to take an additional training course. However, the length of these courses, and the costs, vary widely across the country.
British Columbia has a 10-week full-time course and exam costing $2,500. Plus one year of articling
Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba have slightly different versions of a part-time course developed by the Canadian Centre for Professional Legal Education. The course is mostly online and takes about six hours per week over 24 weeks, and is done during one year of articling. There is no exam, instead there are nine “evaluations” during the course. The cost in Alberta is $2,552, in Saskatchewan it’s $2,450 and in Manitoba it’s $1,600.
Ontario has two exams (barrister and solicitor) and requires 10 months of articling. They also require a short, online, “Professional Responsibility and Practice Course,” which is completed during the articling period with their principal (that’s the lawyer the student is apprenticed to). The cost is $2,400. Ontario had a more intensive course but dropped it due to poor attendance. The Law Society of Upper Canada does recommend a 90-hour optional exam prep course at Osgoode Hall, it costs $1895.
Quebec requires a four-month course with three exams (two tests during the course and a final). The course is full time and costs $4,065. There is also an optional prep course, before the required course. It’s also four months and costs $700. Quebec requires six months of articling.
New Brunswick has a four-week, full-time course with two exams (civil procedure and statutes of New Brunswick). The cost is $1,200. 48 weeks of articling is also required.
Nova Scotia has a five-week full-time skills course followed by an exam and one year of articling. The cost is $3,500
Prince Edward Island requires potential lawyers to take the Nova Scotia course and exam, plus a two week PEI course which cost $600. One year of articling is also required.
Newfoundland and Labrador has a seven to eight-week full-time course, plus exams. The cost is $2,542.50. One year of articling is required.
“You will be one of those poor people . . .”
“. . . but with $100,000 in law school debt”
Of the roughly 18 billion law school related things I have to do this week, one that I’m most excited about is the Canadian Bar Association Student Mentorship program dinner tonight. The CBA runs a program for its student members to get matched up with a lawyer in a field the student is interested in. Tomorrow night we have a dinner to meet our mentors, which is right smack in the middle of the “free food” and “sucking up to actual lawyers” spheres on the Venn diagram of “Things law students love.”
I’m sure it will be awesome. But there is a tiny, cynical part of me that thinks that every single part of this web video currently rocketing around the Facebook profiles of my law cohort will be uttered at some point in the night.
Wikipedia, saviour of law students
Within the bounds of what it’s appropriate for, it’s the best
As a child, if given the choice between spending time with a human or spending time with a book, 99 times out of 100 I would take the book, and the other one time it was probably only because my mother had physically taken my book away on that particular occasion. Books were my friends, and we were the very best of. In library contests where children had to move a paper totem along a wall advanced by minutes read, my little hot air balloon was often idling at the far end of the wall before half the others had even left the start gate.
In light of the hours upon hours I now find myself reading every single day, in retrospect, I kind of wish I had spent at least a little more time outside or developing the social skills that are probably going to atrophy over the next three years of law school.
Everyone tells you how much reading there is in first-year law school, but no one (read: me) really believes it until you get there. A few days before class started in September, some of the first-years were meeting up for lunch when our smart phones all went off with an e-mail from the Assistant Dean. It included, among other illuminating facts about first-year law, that we would probably be assigned 300 to 500 pages of reading a week.
“Okay, but not really,” we (again, read: me) said. “They’re probably just trying to scare us.”
Whether this tendency to believe things in the face of all evidence to the contrary will benefit or harm me in a legal career is yet to be seen. However, the Assistant Dean, unsurprisingly, was not lying. If anything, she was lowballing the estimate.
On any given night of the seven days of the week, I would say I have between two and five hours of reading. The real kick in the pants, too, is that all my amassed hours of childhood (and adulthood) reading has contributed very little to my ability to read what is assigned from law school. In fact, law school in large measure requires the same approaches that one used to learn to read the first time, like following the text with your finger to guide your eyes. The biggest thing, though, is having to pause three or four times a page to look up a phrase (frequently, and I would argue unnecessarily, in Latin) that you can’t quite figure out. And it is on this point that I would like to virtually kiss the feet of the originators of Wikipedia.
I will pause here to note that there are many objections to the use of Wikipedia in academic endeavours, and many of these are valid. I would never, nor would I ever advocate, relying on Wikipedia (or any other secondary source) as the first path of learning something. Nor would I ever cite Wikipedia in an assignment or even in class. My point is, there are limits to Wikipedia’s utility, but within the bounds of what it’s appropriate for, it’s the best.
I’d argue that Wikipedia’s main area of appropriate usage, in relation to law students, is its ability to put into plain language the dozens of new words or phrases we run up against when cracking into those 60-120 pages of nightly reading.
Real life example: Last week, for my property law class was assigned a really interesting case that had to do with the tort of conversion. As a precursor to reading, our professor suggested that we figure out what “conversion” was and my brain was all like “Duh. Conversion is either when you change one unit of measurement to another or that thing that Coach Taylor occasionally talks about on Friday Night Lights. Case closed.”
This is how the case defined conversion: “conversion-a tort that protects against interference with possessory and ownership interests in personal property.”
At which point my brain was like “No mention of measurement has been made, and it seems unlikely this is what Coach was imploring the Panthers to do. Harmonization of previous known definitions of conversion has failed. Wikipedia?”
Conversion is a common law tort. A conversion is a voluntary act by one person inconsistent with the ownership rights of another.[1] It is a tort of strict liability.[2] Its criminal counterpart is theft.
The two sentences are basically the same, but the one on Wikipedia managed to snap the legal meaning of “conversion” to the grid in my head by using plain language that the strict definition given in the case was not, and it did it in about three seconds. It’s pretty hard to argue against the utility of that. And it’s phenomenal how many of the terms and phrases I’m coming across for the first time have fully written and referenced Wikipedia entries.
How did people live before the Internet?
Photo by nojhan
The luckiest law students in all the land
Spoiler alert: It’s the kids at Osgoode Hall.
The decision this week by an Ontario Superior Court judge that struck down three of Canada’s criminal code provisions that relate to prostitution made this week an awesome one to be a law student. In my criminal law class today we spent about half of it looking at the Bedford decision as a way of studying how the Charter can affect the Criminal Code. The planned lesson for today in any event was going to be the Constitution and the Criminal Code, as well as how aspects of morality and harm play into the criminal law, so the prostitution decision just made all of that more current and awesome. Just trust me, it was a really fun and illuminating class.
Fun as it was at UVic, though, it seems impossible to conceive that the luckiest first-year law students in this country aren’t the ones who have Criminal Law at Osgoode Hall Thursday, for the simple fact that their Professor, Alan Young, is the lawyer who got the three provisions struck down. How cool is that?!? Can you imagine what class will be like?
“Guys, listen, I know on the syllabus it says we’re going to talk about how omission relates to actus reus, but instead what we’re going to do is talk about my week because I don’t know what you did this week but me, personally, I got three provisions of the Criminal Code declared unconstitutional. Boom.”
Also, he looks like a pretty funny guy from the section on examination in his Criminal Law syllabus:
In lieu of this mode of evaluation, students may make a significant donation to the Alan Young Personal Reclamation Trust Fund (cash only in U.S. currency)
Come on, that’s pretty funny. Anyway, I’m going to go drown my jealousy by absorbing myself in Contract Law readings.
Not on the syllabus: wine and cheese
When an event is hosted by multiple law firms it’s kind of like speed dating
There are a lot of things that happen at law school which, I presume, people get quickly used to and absorb into their normal conception of the way things are and how they work, but when first encountered as a wide-eyed first year can seem strange and foreign and completely intimidating, especially given the wide variety of backgrounds from which first-year law students come. Most of those backgrounds, I assume, don’t include going to wine and cheese events.
UVic’s first wine and cheese event, hosted by big Calgary and Vancouver firms in town to conduct interviews, was on Monday. The event invitation went out to everyone, and like so many things I’m confronted with that involve new experiences, my first instinct was to hide under my couch at home until the event had passed. Journalism, the subject of my previous career and degree, is many things, but it is not generally considered to be fancy. Nor am I, for that matter. Wine and cheese events, on the other hand, seem entirely predicated on fanciness. Moreover, that was about the extent of my knowledge on the subject — that these things are fancy. Outside of that, I had no conception whatsoever of the things that were meant to happen there, who was supposed to go and who we were supposed to talk to.
Then, of course, I had the following conversation that is kind of like a first year law student Mad Lib, repeated ad nauseum for the first few weeks of school, when there are roughly 18 billion things for us to attend:
Student A: Are you going to [X] tonight?
Student B: I don’t know, I was thinking about it, but I’m not sure. I have so many readings to do, and no one to go with.
Student A: Me too. Hey what if we went together?
Student B: Brilliant! Then we wouldn’t be alone! I’m sure [Students C-Z] would also want to come too. Then we’d be a group, so if nothing else we can stick together.
This is how, on Monday night, instead of doing the readings for my first Torts class, I ended up with three of my classmates heading to the Wine and Cheese event we knew nothing about, except that we had to dress in business attire.
As it turns out, a Wine and Cheese hosted by multiple law firms is kind of like speed dating. The firms sat at tables lining the room, and upon entering we were given a map and bios of each firm present. The responsibility to strike up a conversation with any given firm representative fell upon the students.
This was slightly awkward, insofar as myself and the people I was with were acutely aware that we currently have nothing to offer these people. Monday was actually the first day of real classes for us, so the entirety of our legal knowledge consisted of about two hours of our first Property Law class. We were all of the opinion that practising lawyers would have very little interest in talking about the fundamental principles of property rights.
So what we did instead was to go up to any representatives at a table who looked bored or lonely, introduce ourselves as first years who had had one day of formal instruction, and ask if they had any general advice for us on the first day of class looking forward to the rest of our careers given that most of us have no clue what we want to do, let alone how to go about doing it.
Everyone was really friendly, and quick with helpful general advice, like first-year law grades matter less than any other line on your transcript. That you don’t need a law job after first year if you don’t feel comfortable getting one. That big firms are largely the same in terms of the areas of law practised, so what can be most important is finding one where you fit in personally. That we shouldn’t panic (which is something we’ve been hearing a lot lately, usually because we’re all panicking.)
So, in the end, it was a completely worthwhile thing to go to, even though none of us went expressly to schmooze or “make connections,” which is often other students’ stated purpose for going to these kinds of functions.
And if nothing else, we got a free dinner. I will say this: “cheese” is a misnomer. There was an unbelievable array of delicious, plentiful food there; so much so that we cancelled our post-event dinner plans to go home and digest . . . and get those Torts readings done.
Image: Getty Images
Ranking Canada’s law schools
How do faculty measure up? How do grads fare? Maclean’s fourth annual survey reveals all
Are a law school’s professors significant contributors to the intellectual life of their discipline? Do a law school’s graduates land the most sought-after jobs in government, the private sector and academia? These are the two questions Maclean’s annual law survey seeks to answer.
All of the data used in the Maclean’s law rankings are publicly available. All focus on law school outputs. Fifty per cent of the overall ranking is determined by faculty quality, and 50 per cent by graduate quality.
The four measures of graduate quality look at the success each law school has had producing graduates able to land the most competitive jobs. The indicators are:
Elite Firm Hiring: Maclean’s calculated how many of each school’s graduates are serving as associates at law firms on Lexpert’s list of the largest firms in Canada across all regions, or at one of the five leading New York firms, according to the employment website Vault. This was done by examining the online biographies of thousands of lawyers at dozens of law firms. To scale this measure to each school, the tally was divided by first-year class size, averaged over the past three years. This measure is worth 20 per cent.
National Reach: This indicator, based on the Elite Firm Hiring measure, is worth 10 per cent. It measures the proportion of each law school’s grads at leading firms who are working at firms other than the three that hired the most grads from this school. It’s a measure of the extent to which leading firms outside a school’s region hire its graduates.
Supreme Court Clerkships: A measure of how many of a school’s graduates have served as clerks at the Supreme Court of Canada, this indicator is worth 10 per cent. There are 27 clerks each year; it is one of the most competitive positions open to graduates. Maclean’s looked at the last six years’ worth of clerks. As with the other measures of graduate quality, the tally was divided by each school’s average first-year enrolment.
Faculty Hiring: Worth 10 per cent, this indicator looks at how many of a school’s graduates are professors at Canadian law schools, with extra weight given to grads hired by faculties other than their alma mater.
Faculty Journal Citations: In this measure of faculty quality, worth 50 per cent, Maclean’s employed the HeinOnline database of legal periodicals. The search included citations in international publications as well as Canadian journals in order to reflect the reality of a globalized academy. The number of citations recorded by each faculty member was measured; the tally for each school was then divided by the size of its faculty.
Next page: Which school is on top?
