In the fall of 2020, the CALT website is featuring updates from law professors about how their institutions are responding to the challenge of teaching during a pandemic.

At the University of Ottawa, Faculty of Common Law, planning for the move to fully remote learning started last spring. The Faculty convened a team of staff and professors with experience and expertise in online pedagogy to “lead the charge” to online learning, and support professors transitioning to online teaching. That team put out a survey to assess the needs and concerns of faculty and help establish priorities.

In the fall of 2020, the CALT website is featuring updates from law professors about how their institutions are responding to the challenge of teaching during a pandemic.

The Schulich School of Law is offering primarily online courses, with very limited exceptions for some clinical courses. The first-year curriculum includes some large group classes and some as small group seminar-style classes.  The small group format is a unique feature of Schulich’s first-year law program and it was important to us to retain it even in the online environment.  

In the fall of 2020, the CALT website is featuring updates from law professors about how their institutions are responding to the challenge of teaching during a pandemic.

Ryerson has moved to a fully online 1L curriculum (with some small, optional exceptions for integrated practice curriculum components). Intensive sharing of teaching and pedagogical ideas during the summer has led to a fairly consistent model: a mix of synchronous and asynchronous teaching. The balance varies, with some teaching predominantly through synchronous sessions, while others use more of a flipped classroom model. All faculty co-teach 1L courses with practitioners, who provide weekly one-hour synchronous sessions for each course.

In the fall of 2020, the CALT website is featuring updates from law professors about how their institutions are responding to the challenge of teaching during a pandemic.

The McGill Law community has been resilient and hopeful in the face of our uncertain times. Onboarding the incoming class began much earlier than usual, with Zoom Town Halls in June and contact with incoming students continued throughout the summer. Professors have adapted to teaching remotely, drawing on lessons learned from the last two weeks of the Winter 2020 term when we began teaching online as COVID-19 emerged in Montreal.

In the fall of 2020, the CALT website is featuring updates from law professors about how their institutions are responding to the challenge of teaching during a pandemic.

The Faculty of Law (Robson Hall), University of Manitoba has moved to a fully online curriculum for JD, LLM and MHR (Master of Human Rights) students for the autumn 2020 term. A final decision has yet to be made as to whether the winter 2021 term will be entirely online or involve some in-person components.

In the fall of 2020, the CALT website is featuring updates from law professors about how their institutions are responding to the challenge of teaching during a pandemic.

Classes are almost entirely online this fall for all students, except students in two of our clinical courses who have the option of in person classes. Some of our graduate students are joining their programs from outside Canada and graduate program deadlines were extended due to the pandemic. December exams will be online and students will have a 24-hour period in which they can decide when to write their exam, which they will have 1.5 times the usual period to complete. We are not using any proctoring service for online exams.

This blog post is contributed by Professors Adrien Habermacher & Yves Goguen

In the fall of 2020, the CALT website is featuring updates from law professors about how their institutions are responding to the challenge of teaching during a pandemic.

The Faculty of Law of the Université de Moncton is not offering any in-person activities this fall. All the courses planned, in the first year and in upper years, are taking place online. It was determined that advocacy courses, including the appellate advocacy course which is mandatory in the J.D. program, could not be delivered this year, either online or in person.

During the fall of 2020, the CALT website is featuring updates from law professors about how their institutions are responding to the challenge of teaching during a pandemic.

This autumn term, the Peter A. Allard School of Law (Allard Law) is offering an in-person option for 1L instruction (as long as public health regulations permit). Each of our four 1L sections has been divided into three sub-sections. These groups of approximately 16 students will have access to a law school classroom on a rotating basis, and in a manner consistent with public health regulations including social distancing, masks, and daily check-in safeguards.

In the fall of 2020, the CALT website is featuring updates from law professors about how their institutions are responding to the challenge of teaching during a pandemic.

Western Law has moved to a fully online 2L and 3L curriculum (with some exceptions for clinic courses) but is offering an in-person curriculum for 1L students. Thus, with the exception of one small group (~15 students) every 1L student will take their courses in person. They will have the option of “Zooming in” should they feel ill or be otherwise unable to attend class in person but the expectation is that if they can come to class in person they will do so. 

We are pleased to announce the following events for the CALT webinar series. Please click on each link for more details:

• Teaching Canadian Tort Law in Its Social Context (September 30)
• Critical Perspectives in Tax and Business Law: A Roundtable on Legal Pedagogy (October 21)

CALT is honoured to host this event as part of its ongoing webinar series, on Monday, July 13, 2020, from 2:00 to 3:00 p.m., EDST, via Zoom:

This session will bring together individuals teaching civil procedure and related subjects to discuss how they might address issues of anti-black and other racism during the 2020-2021 school year. The session aims to enable self-reflection and collaborative thinking. The listed contributors will not try to offer definitive answers. Instead, they will prepare a list of questions to guide the discussion, will seek to elicit ideas from the participants, and will offer some of their own ideas for how they plan to address these subjects. The session aims to foster a community of civil procedure teachers across Canada who are committed to race-conscious teaching and learning and who will continue to learn from one another.

The Canadian Legal Education Annual Review (CLEAR) is now open for submissions for Volume 9 until August 15, 2020.

Submissions are encouraged from professionals and researchers in the field of legal education, legal practitioners, and graduate students. For Volume 9, articles in either English or French addressing the issue of online education in Canadian law schools are particularly encouraged, but all articles that address the broader subject of legal education will also be considered.

Articles of should be no more than approximately 8000 words, though longer articles may be considered on a case-by-case basis, and book reviews should be no more than 2000 words. Articles will be selected based on their fit with Volume 9 and the overall theme of the Journal, and those selected that have received positive peer-reviews will proceed to the publication stage. The Journal will also consider publishing non-peer-reviewed pieces such as pedagogical essays, public lectures, and other items related to innovations in pedagogy.

Due to the impossibility of holding an in-person conference, CALT pivoted in the spring of 2020 to organizing online events.[1] CALT is now soliciting proposals from Canadian law teachers for additional webinars or online events on topics related to legal education. These events will be part of a CALT webinar series, to run through the summer and fall of 2020 and possibly into the 2021 calendar year.

1) CALT Prize for Academic Excellence

This year’s winner is Prof. Janine Benedet (University of British Columbia).

Prof. Benedet’s career has demonstrated excellence in multiple ways. Her research has been prolific, courageous, feminist and rooted in her activism. She has shown a consistent willingness to engage in legal education with the judiciary, the public, and especially with her students. She brings her expertise to law reform, litigation and policy-making in multiple fora. With feminism as a consistent thread Prof. Benedet has demonstrated excellence across legal subdisciplines including criminal law, and labour and employment.

The Canadian Association of Law Teachers held two online fora (in “roundtable” format) on law teaching and learning in the COVID context.

The COVID pandemic of 2020 has compelled law faculties to move to online teaching and prompted other major changes, such as modified evaluation schemes. What lessons can law teachers draw from these unprecedented shifts? What further needs are arising, and how should we be trying to meet those needs? What is likely to be the lasting impact? While we lament the circumstances, have we gained any valuable insights or perhaps discovered new approaches that are worth preserving?

The English version took place on Tuesday, June 2, 2020 from 1PM to 3PM EDST.

The Canadian Association of Law Teachers regrets to announce that it has decided to cancel its conference, previously scheduled for June 1 to 3, 2020 at Western University. We have also decided that we will not participate in the proposed online version of the Congress 2020 meeting. For a variety of reasons, including solidarity with the position of the Black Canadian Studies Association, we do not think it is in the interests of CALT to proceed with an online version. 

For more information, please visit the conference page.

The Canadian Association of Law Teachers regrets to announce that it has decided to cancel its conference, previously scheduled for June 1 to 3, 2020 at Western University. We have also decided that we will not participate in the proposed online version of the Congress 2020 meeting. For a variety of reasons, including solidarity with the position of the Black Canadian Studies Association, we do not think it is in the interests of CALT to proceed with an online version. 

We have not reached this decision lightly and we regret the disappointment and inconvenience that it may cause. 

For  anyone  who  has  already  registered  for  the  conference,  a  full  refund  is available.  You can find information  about  the  process  for  cancellation  in  the  email  you  received  (from  Congress)  as confirmation of your registration. 

The current COVID-19 (coronavirus) epidemic has evidently made plans for CALT’s annual conference, scheduled for June 1 to 3, 2020 at Western University, highly uncertain. At the moment, no decision has been made with regard to the cancellation or rescheduling of the conference. We are closely monitoring the situation, in cooperation with the Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences, and we hope to have more details soon. (See the latest updates on Congress’s response to the outbreak.)

For any questions relating to the conference, please write to [email protected].

CALT calls for nominations for its three annual awards (deadline January 21, 2020):

• CALT Prize for Academic Excellence: honouring exceptional contributions to research and law teaching by a mid-career law professor at a Canadian university.
• CALT Scholarly Paper Award: for a scholarly paper that makes a substantial contribution to the legal literature, by a law professor in his or her first seven years of an academic appointment at a Canadian university.
• CALT Award for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: for a paper by a law professor at a Canadian university investigating questions related to teaching and learning.

For full details, please visit the awards page. 

Call for Proposals 

Canadian Association of Law Teachers Conference

Western University

London, ON

1-3 June, 2020

We are pleased to release this Call for Proposals for the 2020 annual conference of the Canadian Association of Law Teachers, which is being held as part of the 2020 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences and includes an overlap day with the conference of the Canadian Law and Society Association. The program for the overlap day will be co-ordinated to encourage integrated participation.

For more information, please view the Call for Proposals page.

The Canadian Association of Law Teachers is delighted to announce that the 2020 annual conference will be held at Western University, London, Ontario from 1-3 June. The conference is being held as part of the 2020 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences and includes an overlap day with the conference of the Canadian Law and Society Association. Please mark the date on your calendars!  Our Call for Proposals will be issued soon.

CALT Statement in Support of the Black Canadian Studies Association (BCSA) and Against Racial Profiling and All Forms of Anti-Black Racism

We, the Canadian Association of Law Teachers (CALT), express our full support for the Black Canadian Studies Association (BCSA) statement, issued on June 4, denouncing an incident of racial profiling and anti-Black racism against a Black graduate student member of BCSA during Congress 2019 at UBC.

As an association with many members engaged in equality and anti-discrimination research, education and advocacy on a daily basis, we condemn all forms of racial profiling, anti-Black racism and discrimination. We are deeply concerned about the apparent failure of Congress/Federation of Social Sciences and Humanities (FSSH) to appropriately respond to this incident. We should note that we are aware of numerous other incidents in which Black people and other racialized people are assumed not to belong in academic spaces, and are accused of theft. Despite the unfortunate regularity of such occurrences, this is an issue of extreme importance that calls for urgent action. We support the demands set out in the BCSA statement, which we reproduce below. We urge the FSSH to immediately address the BCSA demands and to give the highest priority to implementing measures to support and promote racial equality and inclusion at Congress that engages academic attendees, Congress staff and local partners, vendors and service providers.

1. The Federation immediately issue a public response acknowledging this incident, asserting zero tolerance for racial profiling and all forms of anti-Black racism, and a commitment to work with the BCSA to ensure that Congress is a welcoming space and experience for our members;
2. Ensure delivery to the two accusers involved, a letter that will be prepared by the BCSA in response to this incident;
3. The mention of anti-Black racism be added to the theme of Congress 2020: Bridging Divides (for example, Bridging Divides and Confronting Anti-Black Racism);
4. If the BCSA remains a member association of the Federation, the waiving of the association’s fees for Congress 2020.

We are pleased to Call for CALT Prize and Award Nominations 2019. Updated information now available via links below. Deadline 21 January 2019.

• CALT Academic Excellence award

• CALT Scholarly paper award

• CALT Prize for Scholarship of Teaching & Learning

We are pleased to announce that the 2017 Conference of the Canadian Association of Law Teachers will be held at the University of Victoria from June 8-10, 2017, with the Association for Canadian Clinical Legal Education (ACCLE). We are currently planning the agenda and will post the program as it evolves.  We hope to see you in June.

Sara Ross is entering the third year of her PhD at Osgoode Hall Law School, where she has served as an Instructor for the Legal Process class over the past two years. She is also a member of the Law Society of Upper Canada, holding an LLB and BCL from McGill, as well as an LLM from the University of Ottawa, and is the Graduate Student Representative for the Canadian Association of Law Teachers Board of Directors.

This post was derived from an inter-faculty workshop given at the York University Teaching and Learning Conference: “Teaching In Focus”, on May 20, 2016 in Toronto, Ontario.

A frequent complaint heard among law students after graduating from law school is that they have been inundated with information, without feeling that they have been taught the actual skills they need to be a lawyer. In my own classroom this year I have focused on using language that links everything I teach to how the student will use it in a practical context, such as a law firm, the courtroom, and so on. Couching everything within this context allows students to not only build their understanding of legal concepts; it provides them with a way of better connecting this knowledge to a professional skill set. This is what I call the “So, what’s the point?” approach.

You might also frame this “So, what’s the point?” approach as “point-first learning” or “point-first teaching”. As lawyers and within the law school context, our distinct focus on writing, arguing, and, in general, presenting our legal arguments in a point-first manner—leading with the ultimate point that we wish to get across to, for example, a judge or a decision-making panel—is something that can take time to instill in new law students. To aid in this transition, it can be intuitive to teach law in this manner too, and helpful to carry this approach into how we structure a law student’s learning environment and classroom experience. This method of instruction can reinforce what point-first argumentation and writing looks like, but there are benefits beyond this.

Teaching through a “So, what’s the point?” approach also speaks to and draws on an experiential education focus. As law schools are seeking to transform many of their courses into experiential opportunities—legal clinics, and so on—the desire and need to respond to and incorporate the practical element of learning and education is apparent. Encapsulated within this is the need to develop the practical skills needed within the legal employment path a student will eventually choose. And thinking about the skills or concepts you’re teaching in a “So, what’s the point?” manner helps bring an experiential element into the classroom; highlighting the real-world application of what the student is learning.