Robson Hall Faculty of Law has officially adopted the JD law degree designation.

Robson Hall Faculty of Law has officially hopped on the JD bandwagon, announcing last week the University of Manitoba senate has approved the change of its law degree name away from the traditional LLB.

Photo: Comstock

For most Ontario students who started their articling year in August 2010, the end is finally near. After 10 months of what one can only describe as slogging, there seems to be a light at the end of the tunnel. While some have started to make summer travel plans, most of us are walking around these days with barely containable nervousness. The proverbial elephant in the room is now more of a lion in the Serengeti hungry for its next unsuspecting articling student.

Law dean Kim Brooks says they were expecting only a three-per-cent hike.

Law students will be paying extra when they return to school in September. Dalhousie University will increase tuition for the Schulich School of Law by six per cent for the 2011-12 school year. Combined with a $500 auxiliary fee approved by the law school, students could be paying up to $3,200 in additional fees.

Carrie Moffatt has just completed her first year of law school at the University of Victoria.

While Carrie Moffatt is just finishing up her first year of law at the University of Victoria, she’s already winning accolades. Her instructors are hailing her as a sort of paragon of the field; a complete natural who speaks legalese like it’s her mother tongue.

Front row (l to r): Jonathan O'Hara, Marc McLaren-Caux. Back row: Etai Hilzenrat, Aida Setrakian (former U of O Vis participant), Eric Bergsten (Vis Moot founder), Professor Anthony Daimsis, John Siwiec, Diane Laranja, and Sherif Foda.

This past academic year I had the opportunity to help coach the University of Ottawa’s Willem C. Vis international commercial arbitration moot team. The team recently returned from the 18th annual moot in Vienna, Austria as world champions. Held every year in the week before Easter, the Vis moot attracts more than 250 universities from 65-plus countries and is intended to be an educational experience for students centring around issues of arbitral procedure and an international business dispute.

Last week, benchers of the Law Society of Upper Canada voted to participate in the National Standards Project, which aims to synchronize the licensing processes among all law societies nationwide.

The Law Commission of Ontario has recently begun an initiative that is rather different from its usual projects. It is being funded by the Ontario Women’s Directorate to develop law school curriculum modules around violence (particularly domestic violence) against women. “Women” are identified as the focus of the initiative because they are still the vast majority of victims of domestic violence.

(Left to right) Suzie Chiodo, Eugene Polevoy, Elba Bendo, Rajeeve Thakur, Lisa Di Valentino, and Justin Anisman from the Western Journal of Legal Studies.

The University of Western Ontario’s law school has finally secured the right to publish its own student-run law review. Called the Western Journal of Legal Studies, the first issue should be published online in December and is reportedly set to be stuffed full of articles by students, as well as national and international colleagues, with a few award-winning articles thrown in the mix.

Illustration: jupiterimages

Each year a new cadre of freshly minted lawyers enters the legal market brimming with optimism and confidence. Undaunted by the harsher realities of their chosen profession, they secure employment and prepare themselves for a career in law. There are outliers in this crowd; individuals who stand a bit taller than their colleagues, lifted not by merit but by the hot air of an overdeveloped ego. These swaggering braggarts cross the threshold of their career so utterly convinced of their own importance they become intoxicated with an exaggerated sense of self-worth.  To these lawyers I present a sobering antidote: the legal secretary.

All three Canadian teams at the Go-National Dress Ball. Photo: Gordon Brandt

Although moot season wrapped up weeks ago for most Canadian teams, three talented teams made it into the “playoffs” and participated this past week in the White & Case international rounds of the Jessup International Law Moot Court Competition.