At the end of a recent entry here, I asked whether the legal system isn’t perhaps just “a small circle of people on the playground making up new rules for the basketball game going on nearby, then waiting with grins for someone to do something wrong without even knowing it.” Well, no, it’s not. […]

All things went as planned, and I spent this past week in Boise, Idaho, getting inducted into what the Supreme Court of the United States has called “a broad monopoly . . . to do things other citizens may not lawfully do.” That is, I received a license to practice law in the state […]

Ignorantia juris non excusat, or “ignorance of the law is no excuse,” is according to one waggish law professor “almost the only knowledge of law possessed by many people.” This doctrine, which helps the justice system avoid having to make the preposterous presumption that everyone knows the law, is more than a little misleading. […]

Recently on CBC Radio’s “Sunday Edition,” I heard this excerpt from an interview with Wendell Berry, the farmer-intellectual from Kentucky:
You know that everybody subscribed, finally, to what I call the industrial economic program, which said that it was better to buy things than it was to produce things, essentially. That’s the doctrine. You […]

Behind closed doors this past Thursday, the faculty of Harvard Law School voted to majorly reform the first-year curriculum, a curriculum begun in the 1870s by HLS dean Christopher Columbus Langdell and that has been in place for over a century in damn near every U.S. law school. The way it was was Contracts, […]

In June 1975 about 300 key stakeholders from throughout Canada and North America gathered in Victoria, British Columbia, for a national conference on Canadian legal aid. The conference covered three days and treated a raft of topics, but among four major addresses to the conference were remarks by Morgan Ellsworth, then president of the […]

I didn’t think you could wait another day without more lost-and-found conference proceedings masterpieces. Here’s one from Robert Cooper (who I think may be this guy), a Canadian lawyer who in the late 70s was the CBC’s “Ombudsman” and gave remarks at an April 1977 public legal education conference at the University of Ottawa:
After […]

More conference proceedings, to tide you over until I polish off more of the usual, self-important essays. This is off the cover of the proceedings of a June 1979 seminar held at the Caulfield Institute of Technology near Melbourne, Victoria, Australia and entitled “Community Legal Education: Preventive Legal Aid”:

Speaking of graffiti, I ought to mention the listen bird, which I’d guess that everybody who’s spent more than a day in Edmonton would know about. “Listen,” often paired with a particular bird, shows up graffitied (sometimes by stencil) nearly everywhere that I’ve been in the city—on walls, windows, newspaper boxes, Canada Post drops, […]

Ages ago, I promised to provide a link from this blog to my other, high-minded “research blog” once it reached a kind of equilibrium. It has begun chugging along, and I’ve just posted a history of the Vancouver-based People’s Law School, which I’ll be visiting next month. To read it, and to keep […]