Canadian Law Schools: In Search of Excellence

What makes a law school sound? credible? even excellent? Surely many things: leadership potential, good faculty and good students, a solid public image and communication. Greatness comes from knowing our own strengths and weaknesses, our institutional purposes. In short, achievement flows from how we evaluate ourself and how others evaluate us.\u27 A law school must seek to satisfy many goals. Ideally, every legal institution should strive to excel as a facility of learning, as a bastion of intellectual fervor, as an instrument satisfying community needs. Yet each of these goals are themselves variable in kind. Teaching expertise in one legal community represents undesirable teaching standards in another institution. Scholarly contribution in one setting may well be construed as scholarly inertia elsewhere. Achievement and productivity are therefore relative values; for their substance depends on their capacity to satisfy identifiable needs, responding to institutional interests and community concerns

Legal Competence Yesterday and Tomorrow

Attacks have been lodged against the legal profession for many years, indeed, since even before Shakespeare commented in Henry VI, The first thing we do, let\u27s kill all the lawyers. However, it is only more recently, with the growth of mass education and public awareness and with technological advances, that suspicions of the incompetence of lawyers has arisen again with a vengeance. Some would credit this new trend to the condemnation of alleged incompetence among trial lawyers by Chief Justice Burger of the American Supreme Court. But to limit the attack on lawyers to this Chief Justice is to ignore the fact that problems of lawyers\u27 abilities and performance are the inevitable outgrowth of an increasingly rights-oriented public, which has responded to the democratic system by questioning the utility of the lawyering services they receive in return for their money. The members of an educated community, conscious of the exchange of values in a free enterprise system, will ultimately question the mystique that surrounds the legal profession; they will doubt the lawyers\u27 use of a covetted and impenetrable language, and they will likely decline to accept advice without reason, delay without cause, and inefficiency without excuse

The ICSID Under Siege

Rights-based processes, including binding arbitration and traditional court trials, have limited remedies and may not address the full range of interests and needs that the parties may have. Disputes resolved on the basis of power (e.g. through gunboat diplomacy, or at the extreme, violence and war) weight the outcome in favour of the party with the most leverage, status and resources, but this may be costly on the relationships involved and may result in failure to vindicate rights.(1

Contract and Commercial Law Scholarship in Common Law Canada

Professor Trakman characterizes contract and commercial law scholarship in Canada as a young discipline, which has so far focused on descriptive analysis rather than prescriptive synthesis. As the area matures, preoccupations will move naturally to include prescription as well as description, scholars will come to recognize the integration of contract and commercial law with outside values; and the scholarship will accept its potential role in necessary substantive and procedural law reform

The ICSID Under Siege

Rights-based processes, including binding arbitration and traditional court trials, have limited remedies and may not address the full range of interests and needs that the parties may have. Disputes resolved on the basis of power (e.g. through gunboat diplomacy, or at the extreme, violence and war) weight the outcome in favour of the party with the most leverage, status and resources, but this may be costly on the relationships involved and may result in failure to vindicate rights.(1