Replacing darkness and despair with hopes of goodwill and renewed optimism As the holiday season quickly approaches, and another year slowly comes to an end, it seems only fitting to pause and reflect upon the moments that have passed us by, those we currently live in, and those yet to come. It is far too easy for us law students to narrow the perspective on our lives during this time of the year...
Giving Canada’s “Articling Crisis” Another Assessment We’ve heard it for years, we’ve given it a name now and talk about it incessantly – the “articling crisis” that haunts the halls of law schools across the nation, an unprecedented mountain the legal profession has not seen before. The worry is not as bad in first year, as everyone is just starting off fresh in building the resumes and...
OL Experience Around this time last year, myself and the other 290+ students of the Osgoode Hall Class of 2017 had the grueling task of tackling law school admissions. As we spent countless hours trying to decide exactly what a law school admissions committee would be looking for in an application, we asked past students, current students and prospective students to try to gain some...
Osgoode’s Trip to Winnipeg From October 24 to 26, a twenty-two person Osgoode group went to Winnipeg to visit the newly opened Canadian Museum for Human Rights. Our group consisted of the twelve students in the Anti-Discrimination Intensive Program, ADIP directors Michelle Mulgrave and Bruce Ryder, visiting professor Jeffery Hewitt, artist-in-residence Julie Lassonde, and six other passionate...
The truth behind “free-range” farms With increased awareness of the inhumane practices occurring at factory farms, more and more people are opting for meat from free-range or cage-free farms. However, as Dr. Charles Olentine, editor of Egg Industry magazine, articulated, “just because it says free-range does not mean that it is welfare-friendly.” Contrary to what many believe, free-range or cage...
Osgoode Hall Law School is coincidentally located in very close proximity to one of Canada’s most “notorious” and “crime-ridden” locales. For many, the phrase “Jane and Finch” conjures notions of extreme poverty, drug abuse, gang violence, crime, and racialized identities, if not conceptions of even greater heinousness. It is a dangerous place, to be entered with...
Has the Copyright Act become outdated in a new digital era? Once upon a time, it was commonplace for consumers to pop into their local shops and browse through collections of used records, CDs, movies, books, or whatever other media were available for purchase. Students would resell their used textbooks to get back a portion of the initial price paid for them, and Nirvana fans could pick up a...
The Canadian Bar Association Needs to Make Some Changes On October 16, 2014, the Canadian Bar Association (CBA) dropped its application to intervene in Chevron v Yaiguaje, an upcoming Supreme Court case, just before the October 17 filing deadline. Chevron is appealing an Ontario Court of Appeal decision allowing a group of Ecuadorian villagers to seek damages from Chevron’s Canadian assets. In...
A Call for Humility in the Legal Profession We are the next generation of lawyers, and along with our responsibilities to our clients and to the courts, we have a responsibility to shape the legal profession. Many things are changing in the practice of law. We research statutes and find cases online. We write in a far more clear and succinct fashion. We are approaching client service in a much...
After getting my admission to Osgoode Hall earlier this year, I began thinking a bit about what area of law to go into. Then, strapped for cash, I took a job at an automobile assembly plant over the summer. The factory was sprawling, about the size of York’s Keele Campus, and inside was a winding assembly line, which was several kilometers in length. When the line ran smoothly, which it did...
Uncovering the parallels of the Scottish vote with our own, somewhat besmirched history of secession Last week, Scottish leaders followed in Quebec’s footsteps and held that nation’s first popular vote on secession from the United Kingdom. Sovereignty referenda are all too familiar to Canadians. Twice, in 1980 and again in 1995, the Parti Quebécois sought secession from Canada; the latter vote...
There has been substantial discussion about access to justice issues in the past several years. The inability of the most vulnerable in our society to utilize the legal system has been addressed through reforms to the legal system, the availability of pro bono services and clinics, and Legal Aid initiatives or programs. However, most of these discussions and reforms have been on the topics of...
Open any textbook on applied ethics, and you will find the same issues arising again and again: global economic justice, climate change, criminal punishment, world hunger, corporate responsibility, animal welfare, biotechnology. Philosophers don’t agree on much, but almost all of them will tell you that these issues are the biggest ethical challenges of our time. In fact, ask any theologian, and...
I’ve spent a fair portion of my time this semester exploring around the law. That is, instead of taking purely substantive law courses, I’ve been studying issues regarding legal theory and law and society. So far, it has provided me with much appreciated perspectives on the project of the law and its relation to social change. It is easy to become cynical over the idea. Some of us come to law...
A trademark can be almost anything that indicates a source or distinguishes a person’s goods or services. It can include words, symbols, graphics and even sound! Companies spend millions developing their trademark or “Brand.” The issue arises when defending or enforcing trademark rights, for example, from a passing off actions and trademark infringement claims under the Trade-marks Act (see...
“I go to Osgoode, not York.” This reflexive clarification is a matter of pride for my classmates at York University’s storied law school. The urge to distance our degrees from the university brand is visceral. Last week, it was once again easy to see why. Late Thursday evening, a young woman was shot in the Student Centre. A bystander was injured by shrapnel...
The Federal government narrative – that you can worry about the environmental impacts all you want, but the oil sands are fundamentally good for the Canadian economy – makes a lot of intuitive sense on two levels. First, the narrative is grounded in the historically positive ethos surrounding resource extraction in Canada. Canadians have long understood what laid at the foundation of our economy:...
It is an inescapable fact that our lives as lawyers will be guided in part by ethical considerations. For some of us, studying law is an opportunity to pursue social justice. For the rest of us, professional obligations require us to practice ethically and act in the public interest. And one issue that will affect all spheres of practice – from the lowly legal aid clinic to the high society Bay...
Kevin O’Leary’s recent comments on about how half the world living in poverty as “fantastic news” are disconcerting to say the least. According to O’Leary, “It gets them motivation to look up to the one percent and say I want to become one of those people. I am going to fight hard to get up to the top.” “I celebrate capitalism,” he said. You can see the video here. Let’s just take a work at what...
It is a widely held belief that addiction and pleasure make for poor bed fellows. Addicts are portrayed as wretched and joyless creatures: they are pale-faced and sunken-eyed hungry ghosts, stalking the urban landscape, wholly preoccupied with the addiction before them, deriving no pleasure from its fleeting abeyance. The architects of this paradigm are the medical authorities, who tell us that...
What are the costs of providing civil justice to Canadians? What are the costs of not providing access to civil justice for Canadians? These two questions are at the heart of one of the exciting projects underway at the Canadian Forum on Civil Justice (CFCJ). “The Cost of Justice: Weighing the Cost of Fair and Effective Resolution to Legal Problems” is a 5-year, SSHRC funded, interdisciplinary...
The legal world seems to be something of a paradox. Without missing a beat law societies and legal theory espouse lofty statements of morality, while at the same time encouraging lawyers to be nothing more than “amoral technicians”. The message is lawyers are the valiant vanguards of justice and right…unless the client just wants you to help increase the value of their stock, then do that. The...
Though every year seems to bring its own theme of revolution and social change, arguably 2014 can best be spent sewing our past hopes into our future aspirations. Perhaps it is time to put our current conception of “revolution” to rest, to build a new, more lasting, understanding of the idea. Since crossing into the age of majority, and being an avid news follower, I have found myself repeatedly...
And so a new year and a new semester have begun. Hopefully everyone had a fun but relaxing break. As promised, I did some leisure reading and finished watching season one of House of Cards (among other shows that I had neglected because of…well you know, law school). Surely, there is no need to describe the plot. Suffice to say that House of Cards is, generally put, a political drama. It is a...
It’s not just the nature of practising law – the habits and beliefs which make lawyers miserable are instilled right here in law school. 3L should be a time of celebration. Most of us have completed at least 7 years of post-secondary education, sometimes a lot more. We’ve been assessed and prodded more thoroughly than even the finest steak. We’ve beaten the odds again, and again, and again...