As the leaves begin to change, and we find ourselves spending more time at home, Obiter wants to provide you with some recommendations to keep you busy during your study (or procrastination) breaks. Documentary – Knock Down the House (Netflix) This documentary follows the primary campaigns of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (aka AOC) and three other female progressive Democrats who ran for Congress in...
“The better you do in Legal Ethics, the more corrupt you are as a lawyer.” This was told to me by a senior (and evidently, jaded) lawyer when I first began at Osgoode. I believe the underlying assumption of this perspective is that Legal Ethics, as it is traditionally taught, tests your ability to manipulate and argue rules, rather than cultivate “goodness” as a lawyer. Consequently, this...
Welcome to Osgoode. You’ve made it. Congratulations! Over the past few years, you’ve worked to earn stellar grades, experienced the blissful joy of writing the LSAT, and spent countless hours thinking about your wonderful self as you prepared your personal statement. Reality check. You’re smart and sharp. So is everyone else. And now, you’ll be graded on a curve in a school where everyone wants...
The question of who ought to possess the legal right to vote, or who should form the electorate, warrants serious attention. I defend posthumous voting: the view that deceased persons should be permitted to vote. I argue that posthumous events, including state actions, can affect the well-being of persons who are dead. This fact, I argue, warrants the inclusion of the dead in the electorate...
Get Active on Your Professional Social Media Accounts Soon after being accepted into law school, I contacted a few law students that were in my network to ask them for advice on what to expect during 1L. Ali, a 3L at Windsor Law and a former colleague of mine, sent me some general advice. At the top of that list was to get on Twitter professionally. I had been a Twitter user since high school...
Human beings are knowledge-seeking creatures. Evolutionary biologists explain this phenomenon as associated with our awareness of our own vulnerability and mortality. As such, people are sensitive to the amount of information that they possess or lack at any given moment. Intriguingly, we are bothered by either knowing too much or too little. On the one hand, we risk misapprehending the risks in...
Winged Words Story # 1 In 2017, I visited an old friend in New York, to see her city through her eyes and to take advantage of her kindness and free couch. I fell in love with it and vowed to return again in some capacity, if one day I could. It’s the only American city I can see myself calling home one day, there’s something about its vibrance and dynamism, there’s a magic in being lost in a sea...
Elevation and depth in the world serve to complicate one’s wish to move in a linear manner. Yet life is a non-linear journey, and so we find beauty in things that rise and tower above us, and mystery in the incalculable things that plunge below us. There is value, it seems, in viewing things in a complex manner. On the other hand, when we eliminate the complexity of our world, as totalitarians...
Everyone I speak to quickly learns that I’m interested in pursuing criminal law, so it should be no surprise that I enjoy the occasional true crime story or two. The genre has become prolific, especially on Netflix, and there is no shortage of media to consume. I have particularly enjoyed the following stories, and I hope you find something that piques your interest whether you’re an experienced...
Obiter’s Survey of Books on China Continues At the heart of Canadian historian Timothy Brook’s new book, Great State: China and the World (Harper, 2020), is a desire to show that China’s interactions with the rest of the world—at least since the thirteenth century—have been varied and complex. Indeed, China did not exist in splendid isolation until being “opened up” in the eighteenth and...
That was one of the questions put to viewers by Netflix’s recent documentary, The Social Dilemma. The documentary interviews prominent technological experts who helped design some of the most iconic social media functions: for example, Facebook’s “like” button. The documentary begins with experts acknowledging there is a problem but having difficulty labelling and defining the problem. Of...
A few weeks ago, the French film Cuties landed on Netflix amid a torrent of criticism that the movie promotes pedophilia. The outrage was largely tied to the image that Netflix had chosen to market the film, which showed the movie’s 11-year-old protagonists—a group of girls who form a dance troupe—in sexually suggestive poses and clad in skin-tight, barely-there costumes. The image was, as...
On August 28th, the world got the shocking news that actor Chadwick Boseman had passed away at the age of 43 after a 4-year battle with colon cancer. We learned that day that Boseman chose to keep his illness a secret while working on the projects that brought him to fame. Needless to say, Hollywood and, more significantly, the Black community is in mourning over the loss of an actor that took...
The new Mulan is the latest example of big-budget movies that fail to deliver on representation. The announcement of a live-action remake of Mulan, the 1998 Disney animated classic, was met with much fanfare. However, details about the possible addition of a white love interest and the rumour that Disney was not looking for an Asian actress to play Mulan was met with equal backlash. To win back...
Last November, Ray Chen played a recital in Toronto’s Koerner Hall. While Chen did not know it at the time, this performance was one of the last of the Old Age of classical music, which focused on overpriced concerts, traditional modes of teaching, armchair criticism, and poorly paid musicians. In totality, these markers resulted in what was perceived as a dying art form. Nonetheless, COVID...
The Photograph is a love story written and directed by Stella Meghie starring Issa Rae and Lakeith Stanfield, two black actors among the biggest names in Hollywood. Since its release, discussions of its quality have seen it compared to other black cinema, while others simply found it boring. After seeing the film, I beg to differ with the boring label and think that it’s an important work. ...
Four More Books on China The internecine conflict between the Kuomintang (or Nationalists) and Communists defined Chinese politics for many decades. By the time the defeated Kuomintang fled to Taiwan in 1949, it had been going on for over 20 years—intermittently at first, and as a full-scale civil war from 1945. Thereafter, it continued as a mostly cold, very occasionally hot war before settling...
The Photograph is a love story starring Issa Rae and Lakeith Stanfield, two black actors who are among the biggest names in Hollywood today. Since it was released last weekend, there have been some discussions about the quality of the film. Some are comparing it to films such as Queen and Slim while others simply thought that it was boring. After seeing the film, I think it is worth having a...
There is a configuration of identity in our country that is becoming increasingly common with each passing day; yet, without a word uttered concerning its existence. It is a form of identity that is poorly understood by those who experience it, as it is true only half of the time. I am describing Canadians whose identities as ‘Canadian’ have been only recently conferred. Some of us were born here...
The video essay weighs in on the struggle against oppression and how African-Americans are forced to endure this. During the reading break, I had the opportunity to visit Montréal and view Arthur Jafa’s “Love is the Message, the Message is Death, 2016” at the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal. “Love is the Message” is a video essay that has been featured at the Metropolitan Museum...
In veering away from her normal documentary fare, Kitty Green presents a vital distillation of the troubles that have plagued #MeToo Kitty Green’s latest feature-length, following 2017’s Casting JonBenet, is a slow burn that will certainly find its detractors, but its fans might outvoice them. The message is a much needed one in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, bringing attention to the...
Four More Books on China The internecine conflict between the Kuomintang (or Nationalists) and Communists defined Chinese politics for many decades. By the time the defeated Kuomintang fled to Taiwan in 1949, it had been going on for over 20 years—intermittently at first, and as a full-scale civil war from 1945. Thereafter, it continued as a mostly cold, very occasionally hot war before settling...
Four More Books on China The internecine conflict between the Kuomintang (or Nationalists) and Communists defined Chinese politics for many decades. By the time the defeated Kuomintang fled to Taiwan in 1949, it had been going on for over 20 years—intermittently at first, and as a full-scale civil war from 1945. Thereafter, it continued as a mostly cold, very occasionally hot war before settling...
An illuminative discussion with one of Osgoode’s finest In the inaugural piece of what I hope is to become a recurring feature with different instructors, I sit down with Professor Berger for a chat about his career and what he likes to do to unwind. Tomi Milos (TM): I know a little bit about your decorated path through school, but I’m curious as to when you developed a taste for academia. Did...
In vearing away from her normal documentary fare, Kitty Green presents a vital distillation of the troubles that have plagued #MeToo Kitty Green’s latest feature-length, following 2017’s Casting JonBenet, is a slow burn that will certainly find its detractors, but its fans might outvoice them. The message is a much needed one in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, bringing attention to the...