New Approaches to Legal Study

Most lawyers - be they practitioners, judges, or just plain academics - have a fairly clear idea of what it is they must do when studying law . Most lawyers, without giving the matter very much thought, concern themselves with interpreting statutes according to well-understood principles, analysing cases using time-honoured notions such as stare decisis, ratio decidendi, and obita dicta, and occasionally (very occasionally, with much trepidation and many disclaimers) venturing a policy suggestion or two. Not many have wanted to do much else, and few have suggested any virtue in trying anything new. But the winds of change appear to be upon us. The last decade or so has seen development of several apparently new approaches to consideration of the law. It is my purpose in this essay to examine two of the better-developed streams of development, in an attempt to fix their value and significance. I refer to jurimetrics\u27 - a term generally taken to refer to the use of electronic (computer) retrieval, quantitative methods, and symbolic logic in the study of law - and to the growing body of jurisprudential writings by philosophers, primarily moral philosophers, generally on topics of contemporary political interest, such as civil disobedience, abortion and euthanasia

Law Reform in Quebec: A Cautionary Note

Law reform is everywhere in Canada. On all sides substantial changes in diverse areas of the law are constantly being proposed by government organizations whose only purpose is to make such proposals. The reforms mooted by these bodies (these reforms are typically described as long overdue ) are generally welcomed as correcting deficiencies in law and as signalling the legal system\u27s responsiveness to changing social and other standards. Is the law reform pace, if not furious, too fast? What is the most appropriate forum for initiating change in law? Such questions seem reasonable enough, and yet a traditionalist might well argue that irrevocable answers are inherent in any legal system. Both civil and common law systems, so the argument would go, have their chosen instruments of change, and the nature of those instruments substantially determines the rate and extent of progress. If we accept a system, we must accept the way in which, and the extent to which, it responds to alleged needs for reform of its law

Law at Western: 1968-1982

How to assess a decade or more at a law school? Bare facts - the numbers of students and professors, growth in budgets, courses added and dropped, etc. - have the advantage of objectivity (colleagues cannot disagree even were the facts uncongenial), but will leave some important things unsaid. For example, what have been environmental advantages and disadvantages, and how has the School responded to them? And what has been the change in the quality of the School\u27s endeavours; especially, has the Faculty become better? These questions -and particularly the second - are not easy to address. A law school\u27s environment is created by the interaction of several distinct and important constituencies. The main ones are likely these (I list them in no particular order): (1) students (including applicants to the school); (2) the legal profession, formally (Bar Association) and informally; (3) courts and judges; (4) the local, national and international communities of legal scholars; (5) the local, national and international general communities of scholars, particularly those in disciplines related to law; (6) branches of government concerned wth educational policy; and (7) local University management. The aims and ambitions of these constituencies overlap to some extent, but in part are contradictory and competitive. And over any but the shortest period of time, the objectives of these constituencies will change as they in turn respond to incentives and constraints from the outside. The result is a very complex and problematic context for a law Faculty

Consortium-based genome-wide meta-analysis for childhood dental caries traits

Prior studies suggest dental caries traits in children and adolescents are partially heritable, but there has been no large-scale consortium genome-wide association study (GWAS) to date. We therefore performed GWAS for caries in participants aged 2.5–18.0 years from nine contributing centres. Phenotype definitions were created for the presence or absence of treated or untreated caries, stratified by primary and permanent dentition. All studies tested for association between caries and genotype dosage and the results were combined using fixed-effects meta-analysis. Analysis included up to 19 003 individuals (7530 affected) for primary teeth and 13 353 individuals (5875 affected) for permanent teeth. Evidence for association with caries status was observed at rs1594318-C for primary teeth [intronic within ALLC, odds ratio (OR) 0.85, effect allele frequency (EAF) 0.60, P 4.13e-8] and rs7738851-A (intronic within NEDD9, OR 1.28, EAF 0.85, P 1.63e-8) for permanent teeth. Consortium-wide estimated heritability of caries was low [h2 of 1% (95% CI: 0%: 7%) and 6% (95% CI 0%: 13%) for primary and permanent dentitions, respectively] compared with corresponding within-study estimates [h2 of 28% (95% CI: 9%: 48%) and 17% (95% CI: 2%: 31%)] or previously published estimates. This study was designed to identify common genetic variants with modest effects which are consistent across different populations. We found few single variants associated with caries status under these assumptions. Phenotypic heterogeneity between cohorts and limited statistical power will have contributed; these findings could also reflect complexity not captured by our study design, such as genetic effects which are conditional on environmental exposure

Law at Western: 1968-1982

How to assess a decade or more at a law school? Bare facts - the numbers of students and professors, growth in budgets, courses added and dropped, etc. - have the advantage of objectivity (colleagues cannot disagree even were the facts uncongenial), but will leave some important things unsaid. For example, what have been environmental advantages and disadvantages, and how has the School responded to them? And what has been the change in the quality of the School\u27s endeavours; especially, has the Faculty become better? These questions -and particularly the second - are not easy to address. A law school\u27s environment is created by the interaction of several distinct and important constituencies. The main ones are likely these (I list them in no particular order): (1) students (including applicants to the school); (2) the legal profession, formally (Bar Association) and informally; (3) courts and judges; (4) the local, national and international communities of legal scholars; (5) the local, national and international general communities of scholars, particularly those in disciplines related to law; (6) branches of government concerned wth educational policy; and (7) local University management. The aims and ambitions of these constituencies overlap to some extent, but in part are contradictory and competitive. And over any but the shortest period of time, the objectives of these constituencies will change as they in turn respond to incentives and constraints from the outside. The result is a very complex and problematic context for a law Faculty

Law Reform in Quebec: A Cautionary Note

Law reform is everywhere in Canada. On all sides substantial changes in diverse areas of the law are constantly being proposed by government organizations whose only purpose is to make such proposals. The reforms mooted by these bodies (these reforms are typically described as long overdue ) are generally welcomed as correcting deficiencies in law and as signalling the legal system\u27s responsiveness to changing social and other standards. Is the law reform pace, if not furious, too fast? What is the most appropriate forum for initiating change in law? Such questions seem reasonable enough, and yet a traditionalist might well argue that irrevocable answers are inherent in any legal system. Both civil and common law systems, so the argument would go, have their chosen instruments of change, and the nature of those instruments substantially determines the rate and extent of progress. If we accept a system, we must accept the way in which, and the extent to which, it responds to alleged needs for reform of its law

Law Reform in Quebec: A Cautionary Note

Law reform is everywhere in Canada. On all sides substantial changes in diverse areas of the law are constantly being proposed by government organizations whose only purpose is to make such proposals. The reforms mooted by these bodies (these reforms are typically described as long overdue ) are generally welcomed as correcting deficiencies in law and as signalling the legal system\u27s responsiveness to changing social and other standards. Is the law reform pace, if not furious, too fast? What is the most appropriate forum for initiating change in law? Such questions seem reasonable enough, and yet a traditionalist might well argue that irrevocable answers are inherent in any legal system. Both civil and common law systems, so the argument would go, have their chosen instruments of change, and the nature of those instruments substantially determines the rate and extent of progress. If we accept a system, we must accept the way in which, and the extent to which, it responds to alleged needs for reform of its law