University of Alberta Faculty of Law Blog

Sixth Biennial Conference on the Law of Obligations: Challenging Orthodoxy

Our colleagues at the Faculty of Law, University of Western Ontario are hosting the Sixth Biennial Conference on the Law of Obligations, from July 17-20, 2012. The conference will bring together leading scholars in tort, contract, equity and unjust enrichment from throughout the common law world.

The theme of the conference is "Challenging Orthodoxy." They have prepared an academic program of over 60 speakers in which professors, graduate students and eminent practitioners will challenge established common law rules and suggest new approaches to both old and emerging problems. The plenary speakers are Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin and Justice Thomas Cromwell (Supreme Court of Canada), Melvin Eisenberg (Berkeley), John Goldberg (Harvard), Andrew Robertson (Melbourne), Ernest Weinrib (Toronto), Richard Wright (Chicago-Kent), and Ben Zipursky (Fordham).

The Obligations Conference originated at the University of Melbourne in 2002, and has since become one of the leading private law conferences in the common law world. The biennial conferences have been held at the University of Melbourne, the University of Queensland, the National University of Singapore and the University of Oxford.

For more information on the Conference and to register please visit: http://www.law.uwo.ca/Conferences/Obligations6/index.html.

Legal Education versus Scamblogging

I thought I'd share with everyone some links to a very interesting debate/controversy surrounding the latest so-called "law school scamblog." The blog, titled "Inside the Law School Scam," is authored by an anonymous "tenured mid-career faculty member at a Tier One school" in the US. and makes a number of startling claims about legal education in the US. Since it launched on August 7, it has generated intense debate (including ad hominem attacks), traditional and new media coverage, and attempts to expose the identity of the blogger. Here are some quotes from the blog:

"For another, the transformation of law schools from quasi-academic professional schools to serious academic institutions has been, to put it mildly, incomplete. To a significant extent, that transformation has been quite partial and even illusory."

"Despite..all the changes in legal academic life over the past few decades, the law school world  has done next to nothing to create a system of peer review publication.  99.37% of legal academic work is still published in student-run law journals, of which, because of the increased emphasis on publishing, there are now several hundred.  The system, in other words, is hardly designed to reward and encourage genuine academic rigor."

"So no, law school is not a scam in the literal sense. What it is, for a huge number of law students all across the law school hierarchy, is a practical, intellectual, and economic waste of time and money."

"The typical law review article is read by perhaps five people: the author, one or two of the author's more diligent colleagues, and a couple of law review editors."

Hat-tip: Stuart H