MAGNIFICENT OBSESSIONS MERVEILLEUSES OBSESSIONS UNB 2024

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.

Many Professors are interested or curious about the Flipped Classroom, but unsure how it works, or what it actually means to "flip" a course in this way. In this video, produced by Peter Sankoff of the University of Alberta, Faculty of Law, with the assistance of students from his flipped Evidence law class from 2015, he breaks down in detail how the class proceeds - from start to finish – by showing what a "mock" class looks like. You'll also hear his thoughts on the flipped classroom, and better yet, the views of students who can tell you whether it works for them. 

http://ualbertalaw.typepad.com/faculty/2016/05/the-flipped-classroom-in-action.html

If you have any comments or questions, feel free to contact Peter at [email protected] .

THE TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION COMMISSION RECOMMENDATIONS ON LEGAL EDUCATION AND ACCESS TO JUSTICE AS CENTRAL THEMES OF THIS YEAR'S CONFERENCE 

Our programme has been finalized and it is an amazing lineup of panels and roundtable discussions, thanks to your stimulating and inspiring proposals. This year’s conference will take place May 30^th-31^st at the University of Calgary Faculty of Law (with our Awards reception on the 29th).

We are dedicating an entire day of the conference to the T&R Commission recommendations on legal education. This will be on the joint day with CLSA (Canadian Law and Society Association), on May 30^th.  Our plenary panel features inspiring scholars Larry Chartrand, Aimée Craft, Sarah Morales, Karen Drake and Rebecca Johnson, who will start the day off by asking difficult questions and guiding us in taking action individually and collectively. The other sessions will incite even more discussion and exchange about implementing the recommendations in different courses and contexts.

Access to justice is another crucial and current issue in the legal profession and in legal education this year, and it is also a central theme of this year’s conference, with three panels running back to back on the second day of our conference.

And of course, as has been CALT’s practice for the last few years, legal education curriculum and pedagogical issues and ideas will be shared and discussed! We’d like to end things with a discussion on creating and maintaining communities of practice, thus hopefully bringing the different discussions while turning to future action.

The CALT and CLSA joint banquet will be held on May 30^th at the Calgary zoo!

Since most of you will be arriving at least on the 29^th (CLSA conference starting on May 28^th), we are hosting a wine and cheese reception on that day at 5pm to honour this year’s recipients of the CALT awards: academic excellence, scholarly paper, and our new scholarship of teaching and learning award.

To register for the conference, see the Congress website (http://congress2016.ca/ ) where you can also find information on travel and accommodation.

You can download the programme by clicking here.

We look forward to seeing you in Calgary!

Annie Rochette

President, Canadian Association of Law Teachers

Welcome to CALT’s new website!!!

We have been busy developing this new website for CALT members and Canadian law teachers. On this site you will find blog posts about legal and legal education topics, teaching and learning resources, postings for jobs and calls for papers, information about our journal and annual conference. But that’s only the start! The beauty of the site lies in its networking possibilities. With this website, we can manage our own communications to different audiences, we can create networks of members teaching in the same area or concerned about specific aspects of legal education, for example. The site is also connected to our Twitter and Facebook accounts, so if you follow us on those accounts, you’ll know of new posts. We can amend the website, add content, update the database without much outside help, which will help us reduce our costs.

New website, new smaller Executive board, new Constitution, new Advisory board, new award!

It is my great pleasure to be writing to you again this year in my capacity as the CALT president, re-elected at the June AGM in Ottawa for a term of two years.  John Kleefeld, from the University of Saskatchewan College of Law, was elected as the Vice-President.  Derek McKee agreed to stay on as our Treasurer for yet another year to ensure a successful transition to the new treasurer (any takers?). Angela Cameron (Ottawa) was elected as Secretary. We have also a small number of members at large: Teresa Scassa and Craig Forecese from the University of Ottawa and Konstantia Koutouki from Université de Montréal. Jennifer Koshan (Calgary) has agreed to be our local organizer for the annual conference 2016 which will be held in Calgary. Sara Ross is our graduate student representative. On behalf of CALT members, I extend a huge thank you to them for volunteering their time. You can see the members of the Executive here.

I would also like to thank the members of last year’s Executive: Shauna Van Praagh (past president, McGill), Gemma Smyth (Windsor), Amar Khoday (Manitoba), Eric Adams (Alberta), Elaine Craig (Dalhousie) and our two graduate student representatives, Vanisha Sukdeo (Osgoode) and Tenille Brown (Ottawa). Some of these members sat on the Executive for a few years, so a huge thank you for your service and dedication to CALT!

At our annual conference in Ottawa, the many members who were present (thank you!) adopted amendments to the CALT Constitution. Some of these changes reflect technological advances (for example communicating via email instead of snail mail(!), being able to consult our Executive via email), and some of them are more substantive. For instance, Executive members are now elected for a term of two years instead of one (although they must renew their membership every year) to ensure continuity and to be able to plan on a two-year basis. The amended Constitution has also created the possibility for an Advisory Board, with representatives at least from every law faculty in the country, chosen by their own institution. If any of you are interested in becoming an Advisory Board member, let us know! We will be putting it together very soon. The Advisory board may hold a couple of meetings per year, but its members will be consulted regularly on specific issues as they come up (mostly via email). They may also help out the Executive on ad hoc matters.

2016 CALT annual conference

The 2016 conference will be held in Calgary, May 30^th-31^st. Building on the Congress theme of “Energizing communities”, the theme for our conference is “Energizing communities through legal education”. We encourage each of you to submit a paper, workshop, panel or roundtable proposal. There are many current issues in law and legal education to discuss, and the CALT conference and policy committees and board are working to create some forums for these discussions. The success of this conference ultimately depends on your participation !  See the Call for papers here.

New Scholarship of teaching and learning award!

On the excellent suggestion of one of our members, we have also created a NEW award to be in line with CALT’s focus on legal education. This new prize will reward scholarship about teaching and learning in law, published or unpublished. You can find out more about this award in the “awards” tab!

2015-2016 plans

Our plans for the 2015-2016 year include the annual conference of course and the usual CALT activities (prizes, annual conference, journal). We are also exploring different options for CALT’s legal status and for membership. Considering the number of law professors in Canada, CALT’s membership base is still far from what it could be, or used to be. As I pointed out last year, our limited membership constitutes a limit as to the activities of CALT. We hope that the new website and the visibility that it creates will help boost membership. But from my conversations with law teachers in different forums, I have also observed that many people think they are automatically members of CALT, or that once they sign up, they are lifetime members of CALT. Wouldn’t that be nice!!! But that is actually not the case.  Every year, you have to renew your commitment to CALT by signing up and paying the modest fees of $75 ($25 for graduate students). With your membership, you get a free paper copy of the journal CLEAR (the Canadian Legal Education Annual Review) sent to you. 

Are you a member of CALT ?

Join here!

I look forward to exchanging ideas about what matters to legal educators in Canada with you throughout this year.

President, Canadian Association of Law Teachers

The CBA Legal Futures Initiative welcomes interventions from scholars, practitioners, law students, and advocates that address:

• New legal disciplines – what training and education will 21stcentury lawyers need?
• New legal environments – how can we train lawyers to work effectively in collaborative and multidisciplinary teams?
• New licencing processes – how can we encourage experimentation in the methods used to prepare new entrants for their call to the bar? 
• Lifelong education – how can professional development meet the needs of lawyers throughout their careers while also ensuring increased competence in the profession? 
• A more representative profession – how can we ensure that law schools and the profession reflect the diversity of Canadian society to a greater extent, and that law school graduates are able to pursue varied career objectives including social justice?
• Bridging theory and practice – how can legal employers and legal educators engage in productive dialogue about matching law school graduates to legal market needs? 
• The relevant lawyer – how does the profession become more relevant to clients?
• Transforming the profession – how can educators encourage innovation amongst lawyers?

The Challenge

Digital natives now comprise a major sector of law school entrants. Don’t be surprised if they appear in your Contracts 101 class this September expecting to use their Apple Watches or Google Glass in learning the law. Such a scenario raises a troubling discrepancy in legal education methodologies: while most students are quite adept with student engagement technologies (SETs) from undergraduate classes, the majority of their law school professors prefer the passive environment of lectures, podiums, and PowerPoint. There might be a variety of reasons for avoiding SETs: apprehension of the technology, the time required for set-up, or fears that techno-wizardry will bog down content-intensive curricula. Some might also hold deep ideological commitment to the timeworn Socratic method.

As the inventory of SETs increases to include both more functional clicker remotes and web-based mobile phones, as well as videos used in the flipped classroom, there is mounting empirical evidence that active learning can address alarmingly short attention spans, improve grades, and close gender and socio-economic gaps. Such benefits raise the ethical question for us all: are we not obligated as law teachers to employ active learning, including SETs, in the best interests of our learners?