Among the abundant benefits of my Fulbright is the hands-off freedom I get to pursue almost any idea or possibility I please. Although the grant is not entirely unrestricted—I’m supposed to stay in Canada as much as I can and must turn in two very, very brief (i.e., one paragraph) reports on what I’ve […]

Today I left Edmonton, Alberta—my Canadian home base—to go to Vancouver, British Columbia, where I’ll spend the next three weeks. On the walk down to the Asian supermarket after I got in, I was trying to think whether there are two major U.S. cities that are as different as Edmonton and Vancouver. I […]

I’m known to lament that there’s not enough grassroots community legal education going on in the U.S. And I mean both in quantity and in character. The “quantity” complaint is a standard one: even though there are many, many groups providing public legal education to youth and adults in America, there are just […]

Over the Remembrance Day long weekend, I hosted a friend from the U.S. who came up to Vancouver. It was the first time I’d entertained (A) an American (who is not presently dating a Canadian resident) in Canada or (B) a former law school classmate since the bar. Or rather, because I’d been in […]

This post will not mark the first time I have questioned the American law school and bar admissions system. But today I got the latest issue of the ABA Journal and saw where a Richland, WA, lawyer had written in to complain about the Journal’s August cover story on minority women lawyers and how […]

Vancouver—as a city of people—is in turmoil. Debate over social policy for the Downtown Eastside, “Canada’s poorest postal code,” has heated and come to a boil, just as I arrived for my short stint here. “Home” to something like 1500 homeless and over 5000 more folks living in flophouse hotels, the “DTES” is […]

About a month ago, Harvard Law School decided to reform its first-year curriculum—a slate of courses in use for over a century by just about every American law school. People thought that was a big deal, but it’s nothing whatever compared to what’s about to happen in the United Kingdom.
This past Thursday, Her Majesty’s Government […]

I’m back in Edmonton after a three-week stay in Vancouver. During those weeks I lived right in the thick of torrential wind and rainfall, the largest water emergency in Canadian history (forcing over a million people to boil their water for 12 straight days), and then record, unseasonal snowfall and cold temperatures just […]