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...
It goes without saying how much COVID-19 has impacted the world of sports. It is now October and it hasn’t been a week since the Tampa Bay Lightning bested the Dallas Stars, winning their second Stanley Cup in franchise history in Edmonton, Alberta of all places. Beyond rescheduling and reformatting the playoffs, the NHL was forced to delay some of the most important dates of the offseason: the...
The night of June 13th, 2019 was supposed to be the greatest night in Masai Ujiri’s professional career. It was the night Ujiri’s Toronto Raptors defeated the Golden State Warriors in Game 6 of the NBA Finals 114-110, to secure the first NBA Championship in franchise history. In the dying moments of the game at Oracle Arena in Oakland, California, Raptors President Masai Ujiri tried to go on the...
On the ice, the Tampa Bay Lightning finally got the equation right. After unceremoniously being removed from the playoffs last year by the Columbus Blue Jackets in an ugly 4-0 series, the Lightning found their stride in the 2020 playoffs. Perhaps it was getting all-star defenceman, Victor Hedman, back. Or perhaps it was the trade deadline depth acquisitions of Blake Coleman and Barclay Goodrow...
On Monday, September 28, the Governor of California, Gavin Newsom, approved the Kobe Bryant Act. This invasion of privacy bill moved to make it a criminal office for any emergency responders to take or share unauthorized photos of deceased persons at the scene of an accident. This issue first arose earlier in 2020, following the sudden passing of basketball superstar Kobe Bryant, his daughter...
As some of you already know, most of the time I write about love. Because of that, I spent a lot of time this summer staring at a blank screen, waiting for the right words to spill from my fingers. They never did. There was not much to either sew or harvest. Imagine if we had actually kept track of the ways we’d spoiled our earth and its residents. I have also said that I cannot pretend to have...
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all of our lives in ways both big and small; from wearing PPE around on our day-to-day dalliances to lining up outside the grocery stores to purchase household staples. And, for many Canadians, the closing of most international borders is a particularly harsh reminder of our new inconvenient reality – especially as we enter fall and with winter on fast...
“I would like to be remembered as someone who used whatever talent she had to do her work to the very best of her ability.” Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the second woman to serve as a justice on the U.S Supreme Court, an unyielding trailblazer for gender equality, and a lifelong advocate for women’s legal rights, passed away at the age of 87 due to complications from...
Around 15 years after a suicide car bomb in Beirut killed former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and 21 others on February 14, 2005, the UN-backed Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) in Ayyash et al. convicted Salim Ayyash, an operative in the Iran-backed Lebanese Shi’ite militant group Hezbollah. Ayyash was convicted of five charges including conspiracy aimed at committing a terrorist act...
On Friday, September 18, 2020, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away as a result of complications from metastatic cancer of the pancreas. Reportedly, she died at home in the company of her family. Her death meant the end of a 27-year stint sitting as an associate justice on the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS), and for many, the end of a legal and feminist icon. Ginsburg is...
In June 2020, violence erupted at the Indian-Chinese border. Soldiers from both sides fought with their bare hands, pelting stones and wielding iron bars and nail-studded clubs – all in pitch darkness. Many fell to their deaths, off a steep cliff and into the freezing Galwan river. India and China share a nearly 3500 km. long boundary, split into three sectors: the Western LAC (Line of...
In case you have not been keeping up with the drama around video-sharing app TikTok, the app has found a lifeline for its time in the U.S. by partnering with U.S. firms Oracle and Walmart. While TikTok has had major success over the summer and has grown into a massive global craze, the company has come under fire for fear that the data collected on its massive user-base may be handed over to...
During my first welcome reception at Osgoode, I vividly remember a male articling student at the hosting firm telling me, completely unprompted, why there aren’t as many women in law as men. “I guess it’s all the harassment,” he said, laughing nervously. “It can be hard, you know. With sexism.” At the time, I was irritated that he had acted as if this was some sort of revelation to me...
For many Canadians right now, the scale of the coronavirus calls to mind the Great Depression or the 2008 financial crisis—events that forever reshaped society. The current crisis has changed the way we travel and interact with people, the level of surveillance and security we are accustomed to, and even the way we practice hygiene. Will touch become taboo? What will become of sports stadiums...
The world is on fire. Right now the most obvious example of this is in the Western United States where 3.1 million acres have already burned down due to forest fires over the past two weeks. Despite the wealth of scientific evidence that names climate change as the main culprit behind this, President Donald Trump says the wildfires and mass devastation that is happening are just because of poor...
There’s a trope that law school self-selects for people who like to argue. But even if you like to argue, you may not be going about it in the most productive way. If law school is all about education, the way we converse about opposing views should follow suit. This is where we need the principle of charity. The principle of charity addresses how we should assess an argument or particular...
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...