University of Alberta Faculty of Law Blog

Osgoode as it Gets

The Toronto Star is running an interesting piece about a former sex worker whose grit and tenacity landed her a spot in Osgoode Hall this year, and one of ten students whose requirement of a previous degree was waived. As the reporter notes, this Pretty Woman meets Legally Blonde scenario is perfect for a movie script. It is a remarkable and inspiring story of personal achievement against the odds.

Update on UNLV

So those poor students who hadn't received their Con. Law grades back yet will all receive a PASS on their transcript! As the story points out, if you had banked on getting the A in Con. Law and now you got a pass, needless to say you would  be quite upset. Of course, if you thought Con. Law was your bad exam, getting a pass may not be that bad.

This, of course, leads to the obvious question of what first-year course is perceived to be the most difficult course for most law students? I suppose if I were studying 100 years ago, Horse Law might be up there.

Two-Year Law Degrees

Northwestern University's law school is joining the ranks of top-tier schools (perhaps soon to be followed by George Mason) offering accelerated law degrees.

From a Canadian perspective, I can't help wondering if this will add force to the proposed abolition in Ontario of the articling year requirement.  I hope so.  The sooner Ontario jettisons articling, the sooner the rest of the provinces will.

Who did it? They did!

The excellent language blog, English, Jack reported in April that the Department of Justice, working around the clock to implement the Conservative Agenda, has issued a ruling on Them. Not only does the department now have a policy on them, it also has a policy on they, their, themselves and theirs. To be precise, the department has declared that the use of any or all of these pronouns as singular third person pronouns is now acceptable in drafting legislation. English, Jack's opinion: " I do hope that this sounds the death knell for the pointless proscription of singular they."

Up until now I have resisted this trend. I accept the need to avoid gender-specific language, but I have tried, and I have encouraged ('corrected') students to avoid using the third person plural pronoun in place of a singular noun. There are ways to do this: writing in plurals ('lawyers' instead of 'a lawyer' and thus 'them' instead of 'him' or 'her'), using "he or she" and its variants, using "he" and "she" for different categories (for example, in Robert Cover's classic article "Violence and the Word" he uses the feminine pronoun for the judge, the masculine for the accused), or justifying use (for example, when I write about jurors in 18C Nova Scotia, I use the masculine pronoun, but note that this is acceptable because only men were called as jurors).

The problem I have with the plural pronoun used in singular situations is with verb agreement. Take this pair of sentences:
"The professor's job is to teach students the law. He is doing a poor job if he does not help with writing skills too."
There are two alternatives using the plural pronoun here:
1) "The professor's job is to teach students the law. They is doing a poor job if they does not help with writing skills too."
2) "The professor's job is to teach students the law. They are doing a poor job if they do not help with writing skills too."
In the first option, the verb agreement is with the singular noun, which may prevent confusion as to what the pronoun refers, but there is no pronoun-verb agreement. In the second there is pronoun-verb agreement, but the verbs in the second sentence do not agree with the original noun.

The Department of Justice favours number 2, though in the several examples on the web page the authors studiously avoid having to show examples where agreement problems may arise. Likewise, the various writing guides they quote do not, at least in the passages quoted, address this question.

At this point, and as I head into another year of teaching, I am disinclined to accept "they" and its variants as singular pronouns, and will encourage my students to use plural general nouns combined with the plural pronouns. But, I am less certain than I once was on this, I may yet give in to the Department of Justice's recommendations and.I may give up my pointless proscription of singular they.

Should we ditch Honorary Degrees?

It's graduation time - when successful students, their families and friends gather to watch somebody they've never heard of receive an honorary doctorate and give a speech on something they don't care about, or at least don't care to hear on an occasion at which people that matter to them are receiving  real degrees. 

So, says Joseph Epstein, let's get rid of honorary degrees.

As to the question of whether we give honorary degrees, I'm fairly indifferent (although I like the University of Chicago's swag-free policy to which Epstein refers).  What I wonder (although again I really don't care all that much) is why most honorary degrees are in law?  What is it about law as an academic disclipline that makes it amenable to tossing around as a gift to Portuguese authors or Saltspring Island contraltos?  Perhaps we should feel insulted.  I mean, no-one ever suggested giving k.d. lang a doctorate in Agriculture, and yet given her Alberta farming town background she may well know more about agriculture than law.  And do you think Jose Saramago has ever even heard of Donoghue v. Stevenson?  Why couldn't we have given him a doctorate in, say, Portuguese?  Yet, despite no obvious connection between the honorees and the law, a degree in law is the default honorary diplome.

Maybe the problem is that we don't want to do this in an ad hoc fashion.  Maybe Ms. lang doesn't know beans about cattle (pun intended) and so rather than embarrass ourselves by guessing incorrectly we just fall back on a single discipline - any discipline.  In that case, why not law?  Maybe instead of feeling insulted, we should feel gratified that our discipline is recognized as symbolizing the array of benefits that might be conferred upon society in almost any field of endeavour.  ("You like us, you really really like us!!!")

In any case, see you at graduation.  Anyone know who our honorary doctorate du-jour is?

The Bramble Bush

A new edition of Karl Llewellyn's The Bramble Bush has just been released by OUP.

Harvard offers Tuition Break for Public-Minded Students

Harvard Law School is offering to waive its $40,000 tuition fees for third year students who commit to spend their first post-law school years working for NPOs or in the public sector.  The linked article discusses other options that might have been employed such as loan forgiveness schemes.

Of course, when your endowment is $1.7 billion, these things are possible.

LSAT in Brazil?

If you were planning on going to law school, but can't decide where - apparently, the entrance exam in Brazil is so easy that even an 8 year old can pass it! 

Why does the Academy attract more from the Left?

The answer, according to this report, is that the values of the academy conform more easily to those of the left than the right.  (NB:  the link is to a report on the actual research paper, but contains a link to the paper).

I think that this is probably correct, although by "conservative/right", the researchers clearly implicate social conservativism.  Libertarian conservatives (ahem) are probably just as inclined as leftists towards the values this authors (of both the report and the paper) associate with the left (free expression, etc.). 

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. 

Canadian legal scholarship, like Canadian jurisprudence, is different from the U.S. legal scholarship in that, by and large, it is not confined to national boundaries.  As to the jurisprudence, in my field decisions from the House of Lords, the High Court of Australia, or from the Supreme Court of NZ and the NZ Court of Appeal are significant and will often be cited by our own Supreme Court and provincial appellate courts.  For the same reason, many of us have published (and some of us regularly publish) in overseas journals, and to be cited in those journals is just as meaningful an indicator (and, depending on the journal, a more meaningful indicator) of the quality of one's scholarship as being cited in a Canadian journal.  Of course, this would require the ranking compilers to do something more than a QL search, but if we're serious about citations as an indicator of scholarship, then ....?

The choice of L'Expert as the reference point for the elite firm hiring criterion is just as baffling, since L'Expert's coverage does not extend to firms headquartered in some of Canada's major cities (such as Ottawa and Edmonton).  I do think that, if this criterion can be tinkered with in order to address that geographic quirk and also to accommodate other choices that first-rate students make (like government work, public service lawyering, etc.) then this in my opinion ought to be retained.  In the long term, student placement is an important indicator of the value placed by the larger legal community upon our teaching outputs. 

Unlike the McGill authors, I do not generally oppose the idea of ranking our work or our teaching outputs, and I also realize any ranking system will have a necessarily arbitrary element to it.  Macleans also is a vast improvement over that silly Canadian Lawyer ranking system.  (Three cheers to U of A grads for not responding last year!!!!)  But with the benefit of some insight into the Canadian system, it could be a lot better.

Move to a JD? What's up, Doc?

Any faculty member in a Canadian law school who seriously thinks that we should adopt the J.D. designation, or who thinks that a first degree in law is a graduate degree in law, should be ready, able and willing to endure this little exercise in narcissism, taken from LawBuzz.

More on Macleans Rankings

The Macleans rankings are out (here) (detailed breakdowns can be seen here).  Ben Alarie (joined by Ariel Katz) have already made some thoughtful observations.  The methodology is also discussed on the Macleans site here.

Any ranking system is bound to attract critics, and everyone's quibbles will be different.  My principal quibble is that only citations in Canadian journals counted.  There is some discussion about this happening at the moment between Paul Horwitz and Brian Leiter.   I think Horwitz makes a good point about Canadian legal scholarship being more transnational than American.  Most Canadians in my main field (tort law), for example, would consider citations in English, Australian, NZ journals to be at least of equal value as citations in a Canadian journal.  This isn't necessarily a reflection of some typically Canadian national insecurity - in fact, it might be a natural outcome of having a Commonwealth private law jurisprudence, rather than a strictly Canadian one. 

On a purely parochial note, if future rankings are going to rely on Lexpert's list of leading law firms, both the University of Alberta and the University of Ottawa are going to be disadvantaged. 

As to what wasn't considered in the ranking, Dean Patrick Monahan of Osgoode has objected that it fails to consider school's curriculum, students, teaching or educational experience.  I agree that this would give a fuller picture of what law schools are doing, although (and I'm just speculating here, since I know zippo about statistical analysis) it would probably make compiling data a much more complicated undertaking (to say nothing of actually gleaning any information from the ranking, since the raw data might not be so quickly translatable by the reader into a message about school quality), and maybe that's his point. 

Of course, all those things Dean Monahan mentions ought, at some point, to be reflected in a school's teaching outputs.  If so, why not measure it?  Whether they specifically translate into more elite firm placements or SCC clerkships is, I admit, an open question, but the basic idea of measuring whether our curriculum and teaching is actually serving graduates as effectively as it should makes sense.

Macleans Law School Rankings

Ben Alarie at the University of Toronto had an interesting post yesterday on the forthcoming ranking by Macleans of Canadian law schools.

These forthcoming rankings have generated some nationwide buzz.  Part of what gives some law schools the heebie-jeebies about this is the involvement of Brian Leiter whose rankings and commentary have harshly criticized in the past (and it does not all appear to be sour grapes).

I generally agree with what Ben has to say.  Any ranking system is bound to be arbitrary (and as such needs to be taken with a cup of salt).  That said - and while I know some colleagues will disagree with me (since they already have), I think that while the criteria being adopted here will tell only part of the story, they are defensible.  50% weighting is apparently being given to faculty research quality (as measured by citations of work in Canadian law reviews) and 50% based on student quality (as determined by elite firm hiring, "national reach", and SCC clerkships). 

Like I said, these criteria are obviously only part of the story.  I would have hoped other matrices reflecting law school teaching, internal/external speakers, that sort of thing could have been factored in.  I also hope that Macleans realizes that "elite" firms exist west of the Humber River:  most of our best students don't go to Toronto, not because Toronto didn't choose them, but because they didn't choose Toronto. 

The restriction to citations in Canadian law journals is curious, too.  I'd much rather be cited in the Law Quarterly Review or the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies than in any Canadian journal.  So the Macleans criteria are partial.  But that doesn't mean they're irrelevant. 

At least Macleans is giving some competition to the silliest ranking system out there - I write of the Canadian Lawyer annual ranking, done solely on the basis of what the recent graduates tell them about the place.  Some crafty alumni organizers can (and I suspect do) manipulate that to create, frankly, bizarre results. So I was actually pleased when Alberta didn't even appear in last year's Canadian Lawyer rankings because of too few responses. Stupid questions deserve stupid answers.

Jobs for Law Students

Every year around this time I bump into the odd student who graduated and still does not have a job; however, most of our graduates, as far as I can tell, have been gainfully employed. Prospepective law students in Canada who are thinking of heading south, on the other hand, may wish to pay attention to what the job situation is like down there. Two threads at Above the Law (with a link to the National Law Journal story that started the discussion) and WSJ Blogs paint a less than rosy picture of jobs for JDs.