What Will Rising Law School Tuition Fees Mean for Law and Learning?

Author(s):  
Jo-Anne Pickel

Last year, the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto approved a plan that will see tuition fees increase from $12 000 to $22 000 dollars over the next five years. Other Canadian law faculties are beginning to follow, or are considering following, the University of Toronto's lead. In light of this trend toward higher tuition fees, the time is ripe to step back and ask: what will this mean for legal education in Canada? In particular, on the twentieth anniversary of the release of Law and Learning (the “Arthurs Report”), it would seem important to reflect on the impact that higher tuition fees might have on law and learning in Canada. What will dramatic increases in tuition mean for the values and laudable objectives set out in the Arthurs Report? These are some of the issues that I seek to address, partly through a personal reflection on my own experience as a law student and as someone who is near the completion of graduate studies in law.

2014 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 761
Author(s):  
Rosalie Jukier ◽  
Kate Glover

In this article, the authors argue that the longstanding trend of excluding graduate studies in law from the discourse on legal education has detrimental effects on both the discourse and the future of the law faculty. More specifically, disregarding graduate legal education is at odds with the reality of graduate studies in Canadian law faculties today, ignores the challenges of graduate programs in law, and perpetuates inaccurate distinctions about both the career aspirations of law students and the relationship between undergraduate and graduate legal studies. In the authors’ view, these concerns can be overcome by reframing the discourse. Once the purpose of legal education is understood to be the cultivation of jurists and the law faculty is seen as an integrated whole of people, place, and program, graduate legal education moves easily into the discussion on the future of the law faculty. Including graduate studies in the discourse is an opportunity to explore, and be hopeful about, the institutional missions of law faculties and their place in the university, the optimization of legal education at all levels, and the methods by which participants in graduate studies should fulfill their responsibilities to the future of the discipline.


Author(s):  
Kelly Gallagher-Mackay

AbstractThe Nunavut Land Claim Agreement commits federal and territorial governments to the recruitment and training of Inuit for positions throughout government. In the justice sector, there is currently a major shortage of Inuit lawyers or future judges. However, there also appears to be a fundamental mismatch between what existing law schools offer and what Inuit students are prepared to accept. A northern-based law school might remedy some of these problems. However, support for a law school requires un-thinking certain key tenets of legal education as we know it in Canada. In particular, it may require a step outside the university-based law school system. Universities appear to be accepted as the exclusive guardian of the concept of academic standards. Admission standards, in particular, serve as both a positivist technology of exclusion, and a political rationale for the persistence of majoritarian institutions as the major means of training members of disadvantaged communities. Distinctive institutions – eventually working with university-based law schools – have the potential to help bridge the education gap between Inuit and other Canadians. In so doing, they have the potential to train a critical mass of Inuit to meaningfully adapt the justice system to become a pillar of the public government in the Inuit homeland of Nunavut.


2015 ◽  
Vol 123 (3) ◽  
pp. 561-570 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher S. Lozano ◽  
Joseph Tam ◽  
Abhaya V. Kulkarni ◽  
Andres M. Lozano

OBJECT Recent works have assessed academic output across neurosurgical programs using various analyses of accumulated citations as a proxy for academic activity and productivity. These assessments have emphasized North American neurosurgical training centers and have largely excluded centers outside the United States. Because of the long tradition and level of academic activity in neurosurgery at the University of Toronto, the authors sought to compare that program's publication and citation metrics with those of established programs in the US as documented in the literature. So as to not rely on historical achievements that may be of less relevance, they focused on recent works, that is, those published in the most recent complete 5-year period. METHODS The authors sought to make their data comparable to existing published data from other programs. To this end, they compiled a list of published papers by neurosurgical faculty at the University of Toronto for the period from 2009 through 2013 using the Scopus database. Individual author names were disambiguated; the total numbers of papers and citations were compiled on a yearly basis. They computed a number of indices, including the ih(5)-index (i.e., the number of citations the papers received over a 5-year period), the summed h-index of the current faculty over time, and a number of secondary measures, including the ig(5), ie(5), and i10(5)-indices. They also determined the impact of individual authors in driving the results using Gini coefficients. To address the issue of author ambiguity, which can be problematic in multicenter bibliometric analyses, they have provided a source dataset used to determine the ih(5) index for the Toronto program. RESULTS The University of Toronto Neurosurgery Program had approximately 29 full-time surgically active faculty per year (not including nonneurosurgical faculty) in the 5-year period from 2009 to 2013. These faculty published a total of 1217 papers in these 5 years. The total number of citations from these papers was 13,434. The ih(5)-index at the University of Toronto was 50. CONCLUSIONS On the basis of comparison with published bibliometric data of US programs, the University of Toronto ranks first in terms of number of publications, number of citations, and ih(5)-index among neurosurgical programs in North America and most likely in the world.


John W. Magladery was born in New Liskeard, Ontario on October 11, 1911. He graduated from Upper Canada College in 1929 and the University of Toronto Medical School in 1935. As a Rhodes scholar, he received the degree of D. Phil, in Neurophysiology from Oxford University in 1937. During World War II, he was a major in the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps. Post-graduate studies were undertaken at the University of Toronto and the National Hospital, Queen Square.


2010 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 98-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Eaton

AbstractIn this philosophical article John Eaton from the University of Manitoba recounts the current legal education system in Canada and reflects on the issues involved in teaching legal research skills, including problems with where to base the training within the curriculum, and difficulties encountered in the migration from hard copy research, to current students' predilections for using electronic sources. Whilst based on the Canadian process his article has a wider application in relation to the “Google-generation” of students.


2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-151
Author(s):  
Cosmos Nike Nwedu

Whenever the discourse of clinical legal education (CLE) ascends, the likely injudicious assumption that may come to one’s mind, especially of a layman is that, it concerns only classroom or clinically confined pedagogy marked by simulations; in-house law student learning activities that end up with their regular experiences of the learning processes. However, CLE in reality, beyond parochial thinking is a socio-legal justice tool for addressing motley challenges of humanity particularly those that confront poverty-stricken and vulnerable citizens who are always undid from equal opportunities and access to the court system. Thus, this article argues that CLE transcends what goes on in typical classrooms or law clinics. The article explores different realistic clinical legal education justice initiatives (CLEJIs) that university and law school students can work with in fostering social justice in a wider societal context. To achieve this purpose, the article considers a rethink of the concept of CLE to capture its historical rationales against definitional setback offered by some authors. It further highlights some critical issues indispensable for the sustainability of CLE initiatives around the world. While the argument of this study draws upon existing findings, it presents new ideas achieved through synthesis of thinking in a qualitatively analytical perspective.


2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 23-52
Author(s):  
Yvette Maker ◽  
Jana Offergeld ◽  
Anna Arstein-Kerslake

The Disability Human Rights Clinic (DHRC) was established at Melbourne Law School, the University of Melbourne, in 2015.  Its supervisors and students conduct legislative and policy reform projects as well as strategic litigation. The DHRC was created by Anna Arstein-Kerslake to address a significant lack of resources in community-based organisations to undertake in-depth legal analysis. It uses an innovative model of clinical legal education to harness the skills of law students to fill that gap and to expose a new generation of lawyers to the emerging field of disability human rights law. In this article, we draw on our experiences running the DHRC to argue that the model it establishes can create significant scholarly output in the human rights field, direct engagement with the community, and rich doctrinal and experiential learning for students.


2014 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 149
Author(s):  
Vendula Bryxová ◽  
Maxim Tomoszek ◽  
Veronika Vlcková

<p>In the Czech Republic, clinical legal education is not very developed. It does not fit into the traditional view of legal education, which itself is based mainly on an Austrian and German legal tradition which emphasizes legal positivism, legal history and a lecture style of lessons. The university environment in the Czech Republic is very conservative. Open minded teachers (mostly young assistants) have very little space for their own creativity during the lessons. Most of the Czech law teachers do not have any training in teaching methodology. Moreover the general attitude is that there is no special need for practical courses because “the students will receive their practical training once they are in practice after finishing the law school”. These attitudes result in very sceptical approach to the methodology of teaching, if we can speak about any methodology at all. To put it simply, the content of the lecture is seen as more important than the way the content is taught.</p>


Author(s):  
R. St. J. MacDonald

From 1872 until 1913 legal education in Manitoba was dependent almost entirely on apprenticeship, supplemented by private study. In 1913 the Law Society of Manitoba organized an improved programme of lectures for intending members of the bar and in 1914 the society entered into an agreement with the University of Manitoba to create and operate jointly the Manitoba Law School. The school's expenses were to be shared equally by the two parent bodies and its operations were to be supervised by a board of trustees consisting of two appointees chosen by each body and a chairman elected by the appointees. The school was modelled on the Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto and offered a three-year lecture course leading to both the LL.B. degree and admission to practice. As at Osgoode Hall, enrolment at the law school was not regarded as a substitute for service under articles. Classes were held in the morning and late afternoon and students were expected to carry out office duties during the remainder of the day.


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