I have spent the last couple days in Fredericton, capital city of the officially bilingual province of New Brunswick. My too-short stint (Wednesday evening through Saturday morning) in that picturesque city was frenetic and mostly internet-less. Hot and fresh donuts from the Boyce market, a specially arranged tour of the beautifully restored legislature […]

This afternoon I could be found way in the top of the Centre Bell, watching golden boy Sidney Crosby and his fellow Pittsburgh Penguins fall in overtime to les Canadiens de Montréal. Why blog this? During the singing of the American national anthem, a row of three folks in Habs sweaters in front […]

Today was a pan-Canadian “Student Day of Action” for demonstrations in support of reduced university tuition fees. I got to see these protests in both Montréal and Ottawa today—lots of students bundled up with toques and mitts and carrying signs in frigid weather. How bad are the fees? Well, they’re at their […]

Arrived in the nation’s capital about twenty-four hours ago. The national iglooo is located here, and I accidentally had the good sense to arrive cloddily in the thick of Winterlude. So, I get to eat beaver tails and ogle ice sculptures while dashing between meetings that seem slightly more important than usual because […]

The 2007 Equal Justice Conference is coming up, as well as the concurrently-held annual gathering of State Access to Justice Commissions. What will the big topics be, according to the advance agendas? Pro bono, pro bono, pro bono, and pro bono (43% of agenda items, by my rough count). Also, a little […]

Community legal education doesn’t really show in the agenda for this year’s Rebellious Lawyering conference, either (although it has in the past). But, a panel on anarchist lawyering makes up for that, for me—especially a panel made up entirely of Katya Komisaruk.

Now, at the end of an odyssey, is Toronto, Canada’s biggest city. It is this huge nation’s economic and perhaps cultural capital. Culturally, though, I’m amazed at how American it feels. No other major city in this country (and I’ve now been to nearly all of them) has felt so familiar to […]

The Legal Services Corporation (the federally-funded U.S. entity that supports many of America’s legal aid organizations) will be getting a $22 million funding increase in 2007. Last Thursday, H.J. Res. 20 became law, upping the appropriation for LSC from $326.5 million to $348,578,000. This is LSC’s first increase in four years. All […]

Today the hyper-enriching Peter Levine writes about “fit” between class and the labor market, noting how it’s not just that wealthy people have more money, but that the way they raise their kids makes those kids better candidates for white collar jobs. This phenomenon is likely most pronounced in the legal profession. If, […]

The authors of a twenty-year-old international review of public legal education that I was rereading today suggest that there are three possible “systems” of public legal education:

An “operational” system, where law is written in technical language but instruments of law like contracts and court forms must be written in plain and communicative ways.
A “two-tier” system, […]