RSS FeedCase Comment – Gomboc Decision, 2010 SCC 55
Here is a link to my website for a case comment on the Gomboc that will be published in an upcoming issue of RegQuest.
Enjoy the reading.
UWO Law Welcomes AIDWYC @ Western
AIDWYC. Does that mean anything to you?
I, Ryan Venables, am very please to announce that thanks to Jonathan Thoburn and Lisa Lutwak, a couple of very keen and persistent (that’s a good thing) 1L law students, that UWO law students are now going to have the opportunity to be reviewing cases in association with AIDWYC.
I think this is a perfect time to bring this story forward considering the recent news of the acquittal of Ivan Henry, who spent 26 years in a B.C. prison for a series of sexual assaults that he did not commit.
Don’t know AIDWYC? Well, keep reading, and soon you will. Here’s how this great partnership has come to be.
As the President for the Criminal Law Student’s Association this year, I was contacted by Jonathan, an incoming 1L, who was eager in starting up AIDWYC under the umbrella of the CLSA. He had already contacted the administration and was given the green light and it was suggested to him that while in its infancy, that AIDWYC @ Western be under the umbrella of the CLSA.
Since I had never heard of AIDWYC I had to do some digging. Here is what I found out. From the AIDWYC Website:
*****
AIDWYC is a non-profit organization that has developed a strong reputation as an advocate for individuals who have been wrongly convicted.
AIDWYC’s primary mandate is to review and support claims of innocence in homicide cases.
However, because individual exonerations do not eliminate the conditions which foster these miscarriages of justice, AIDWYC is also dedicated to addressing the causes of wrongful conviction by:
- Making representations to governments on reforms to the legal system
- Raising public awareness about miscarriages of justice
- Participating in public inquiries related to wrongful convictions
- Intervening in legal cases which seek to rectify miscarriages of justice
There is no system in place at present in Canada for an independent review of claims of wrongful conviction. AIDWYC fills this gap, attracting some of the top legal experts in Ontario to identify these cases and, where warranted, prepare an application for ministerial review to the Criminal Conviction Review Group of the Federal Department of Justice, known as a Criminal Code Section 696.1 application.
AIDWYC’s office is located in Toronto and much of our work is done in Ontario. However, we have dedicated volunteers throughout Canada and in the United States. AIDWYC welcomes applications from across the country. AIDWYC is currently reviewing over sixty claims of innocence and actively pursuing more than 40 cases.
All Canadian citizens stand to benefit from AIDWYC’s efforts to free those who have been wrongly convicted and to reform the justice system wrongfutem of justice, but everyduce or prevent wrongful convictions in the future. Canada has an excellent sysand safeguard its integrity. Wrongful convictions are not easily corrected. The resistance to AIDWYC’s efforts is formidable and the correction of miscarriages of justice is always hard-won.
*****
Successes? Robert Baltovich; James Drisk; Anthony Hanemaayer; Clayton Johnson; David Milgaard; Guy Paul Morin; William Mullins-Johnson; Gregory Parsons; Romeo Phillion; Sherry Sherrett-Robinson; Thomas Sophonow; Steven Truscott; Kyle Unger; Erin Walsh.
Fast forward to today. AIDWYC @ Western is in the final stages of picking volunteers who will be assigned cases, reviewing them, and working hard to have the wrongfully convicted freed. It is hoped that as this project grows it will be able to come out from underneath the support of the CLSA and to form a group at Western Law akin to Pro Bono Student’s Canada.
Not only does this give fledgling lawyers a great way to get involved with a great cause, it will also give them practical experience that law student’s seem to lack coming out of school.
I personally look forward to seeing this great opportunity for students grow here at Western.
Breaking into the Field of Criminal Law
While I really should be studying for the bar exam right now, I couldn’t pass up on the opportunity to share a great article appearing in the current issue of Canadian Lawyer 4Students Magazine.
The article, entitled “So You Wanna Be a Criminal Lawyer, Eh?” is about the challenges facing current law students who plan to practice in criminal law. There is a particular focus on the lack of articling opportunities in the field, and the ever-decreasing emphasis on criminal law education at law schools. I can tell you first hand that these issues are very real and very troubling.
The author quotes my former Career Services Director, Robyn Martilla, on the difficulties in finding employment opportunities in criminal law:
It is also possible students are not so much turned off the practice area’s dark side, but instead diverted from it by large firms’ powerful recruitment strategies. Robyn Martilla, director of Western Faculty of Law’s career and professional development office, says it’s difficult for students to find information on criminal law articling positions. “The schools tend to get a lot of information from private firms, like the large Bay Street group,” says Martilla. “So that information is easily available to students. But it’s much more difficult to find information about positions in either family or criminal law.”
There is a choice quotation from Montreal criminal lawyer Isabel Schurman on what we stand to lose as our criminal defence bar shrinks and ages:
She suggests this much-maligned area of practice has been given a bad rap over the years, and more students should open their eyes to a career in criminal defence. “It’s a shame that the field is so misunderstood,” says Schurman. “I think it’s a shame that people never realize the important role that defence counsel play until they, or someone in their family, needs representation, and then realize that it’s not simply this television or movie image of defence counsel. We are in fact the watchdogs for the fairness in our system of criminal justice, and without a strong defence bar, the whole system suffers, and so does the citizen’s right to be left alone by the state.”
The article concludes with some practical tips on breaking into the field, many of which I can endorse from personal experience. If you’re considering criminal law, I recommend checking the article out here.
The criminal lawyers I know tell me that although the challenges are many, they are more than offset by the rewards of practicing in this exciting field. This was summarized in one of my favorite admonitions from a criminal defence lawyer: “trust me, you don’t want to practice criminal law. That being said, I absolutely love my job, and can’t imagine myself doing anything else.”
UWO Student’s Charges Stayed…
In an interesting twist, the Crown has decided to stay all charges against fourth year UWO student Irnes Zeljkovic.
Zeljkovic’s incident involving UWO Campus and London Police made national headlines late last year when he was arrested in what some described as nothing more than police brutality. I qualified the arrest both here and on CFRB 1010′s Jim Richard’s Show by saying that I thought all aspects minus the baton strikes were acceptable.
Although no details were released about what transpired in court, Zeljkovic’s lawyer, Phillip Millar of Cohen Highley plans on talking with UWO officials first about his client’s reinstatement and then one can only assume about a potential settlement regarding the arrest.
Also last year, UWO officials hired former OPP Commissioner Gwen Boniface to investigate the incident. To date, no information has been release with respect to her independent investigation.
The Life and Times of Ivan C. Rand
From Volume III, Issue II of Amicus Curiae, Western Law’s Student Paper
Canada was a different place before Trudeaumania swept the nation, and the man we know as Ivan Rand, founding Dean of this law school and former Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, was a product of his times. It would be easy to dismiss Dean Rand as an intolerant bigot, but as William Kaplan explained to an audience at Western Law on Nov. 11, [2009,] Rand was complicated character.
“Canadian judicial biography has been, with a few exceptions, mostly uncritical and largely celebratory, written by unabashed admirers,” Kaplan writes in his new book, Canadian Maverick – The Life and Times of Ivan C. Rand. “To my great surprise, this book turned out to be different.”
Ivan Rand was born and raised in the Maritimes and graduated from Harvard Law in 1912. It was his exposure to the American Bill of Rights that, according to Kaplan, differentiated Rand from other Canadian lawyers. And it’s Justice Rand’s decisions as a Justice of the Supreme Court that make his legal legacy so difficult to reconcile with his private views, which have been largely hidden until now.
By 1951, the court in Noble v. Alley assessed a restrictive covenant against selling property in the Grand Bend area to Jews, blacks, or those with “coloured race or blood.” It was Justice Rand who interrupted oral submissions by the respondent saying,“If Albert Einstein and Arthur Rubinstein purchased cottages there, the property values would increase, and the association should be honoured to have them as neighbours.”
Despite his position on restrictive covenants in this case, he was a member of two restrictive clubs that excluded Jews. He defended the right of Communists to hold elected positions, and famously opposed the internment of Japanese citizens, all the while refusing to meet his sister’s Acadian husband for 30 years because of his background.
“It’s this hypocrisy – because he did know better – that ultimately leads me to conclude: first-rate mind, third rate temperament,” said Kaplan, noting that the most influential judges are rarely collegial consensus builders. “Not such a bad combination.”
What, if anything, changed during his lifetime?
Kaplan suggests that Rand’s exposure to Jews in the Palestine Mandate may have led him to develop a more favourable impression of Jews. Rand was impressed by the largely secular, often highly educated and industrious, and was sometimes even disdainful of the religious establishment of the Holy Land. He believed that rational law could resolve all human conflict, and was a social engineer at heart.
Robert Mackay, one of Rand’s colleagues at Western who would eventually succeed him as Dean, recalls Rand’s rants against Jews and people with ethnic names that ended with a vowel: “Rand would declare he had enough of them.”
Yet he continued to donate to Hebrew University in Jerusalem for the rest of his life. A forest in Israel was named after him, and he would tour the country receiving awards.
So what is Rand’s legacy for this school?
Kaplan tellingly notes, “Almost all of his great civil libertarian decisions reversed the actions of state authorities in Quebec.” Mackay explained, “Rand had to decide who he hated more – the French-Canadian Roman Catholics, or Jehovah’s Witnesses.”
Rand believed that ethics could not be taught – either you had them or you didn’t. Western is now known as a pioneer in legal ethics education.
The Ivan Rand window in the Moot Court Room looms menacingly above all those who dare try their hand at advocacy. Rand himself believed that mock trials courts were entertaining, but not educational. He preferred his old 1909 Harvard law texts for the students.
Rand felt that women were good as solicitors but did not have the fortitude for criminal law, a notion that would not bode well for our classes in which women outnumber men , the legal aid clinic, or our struggling criminal law program.
Dean Rand defied utilitarian economics by taking surplus budgets and returning them to the university, much to the chagrin of his staff. He abandoned the administration of the law school only months after its opening to attend to a coal crisis in Cape Breton.
Yet the students loved him.
The Rand formula, where workers pay union dues irrespective of membership, is still one of the hallmark characteristics of Canadian labour law. One of Rand’s recommendations (which was never adopted) was that unions be recognized as legal entities that could sue and be sued [directly, and not through agents]. Another was abolishing picketing altogether.
Overall, Kaplan describes Rand’s own hand at labour relations as nothing less than “disastrous,” with nearly every stakeholder and political party expressing strong criticism. “Reforming labour law,” Kaplan said, “is best done incrementally.”
As our own Dean Holloway acknowledges, “it’s difficult to write fairly about Ivan Rand… What emerges is a picture of a principled man, who thought deeply about the best way to enhance the standards of this profession.”
Kaplan suggests that what makes Rand impressive is his ability to draw bright lines between his public and private life, especially when on the Court. And for a man whose vision in many ways may have been ahead of his time, perhaps that is the most we can ask for.
Strikers To Target Students…
Yesterday at 00:01, the London Transit Commission went on strike for the first time in almost 30 years. The local 741 Amalgamated Transit Union and the City of London are, depending on who you talk to, either close or far from a deal.
As I am fortunate enough to own a vehicle and I have offered my spare seats to pick up other law students. As I was driving in to pick up a friend, I was listening to the radio and I was glad to hear that UWO had decided to assist students by renting upward of 50 vans to drive students who live more than a 30 minute walk from campus to and from school.
The conversation quickly changed when in the hosts next breath he reported that Pat Hunniford, president of the local transit union, had declared that if UWO goes ahead with trying to provide transportation to its students, that his union would setup a picket line at UWO!
But, he warned, if the University of Western Ontario goes ahead with volunteer drivers using vans to move students, the union will put up picket lines at the campus.
Western’s unions have agreed not to cross those lines, he said.
“The students may get to classes, but they may not have anybody teaching them.”
The longer the strike goes on, the longer it will take for service to resume once a deal is signed, Hunniford added.
Although I understand the importance of unions, I feel that the potential of UWO’s unions holding a sympathy strike would do nothing more than hurt the students. However, I digress.
Back to the LTC picketing UWO’s attempt to provide an reasonable alternative for its students. I immediately thought of the legality of this. In my two months of law school, we have covered cases like this, where the court held that it was illegal to strike on private property (see: Harrison v. Carswell (1975), [1976] 2 S.C.R. 200).
The next thing I thought, is whether the property flowing through UWO’s “boundaries” is actually considered private. For this we can refer back to Harrison v. Carswell where in that case the picketing was occurring on a shopping mall’s property. UWO much like a shopping mall has a direct invitation for people to come on its property to enjoy its use. The dissent in Harrison v. Carswell argued the mall was a public place and as such could be used as such “revocable only upon misbehaviour (and I need not spell out here what this embraces) or by reason of unlawful activity”
However, public and private property in Ontario are also included in Trespass to Property Act, R.S.O. 1990, c. T.21 defines what property (aka premises) is:
“premises” means land and structures, or either of them, and includes,
(a) water,
(b) ships and vessels,
(c) trailers and portable structures designed or used for residence, business or shelter,
(d) trains, railway cars, vehicles and aircraft, except while in operation. (“lieux”) R.S.O. 1990, c. T.21, s. 1 (1).
As with this definition, it would be fully within the power of the UWO administration to prevent LTC picketers from setting up and preventing the transit of students to and from class. Although I am probably missing something under various Ontario labour laws, I am not really prepared to undertake a full research project into the legality of roaming strikes. Should my simple research turn out to be the law regarding this and should the LTC setup picket lines surrounding UWO, I would encourage the administration to take all necessary steps to ensure that students are not only able to have rides to school, but that classes will still occur.
Should the LTC begin to picket UWO and prevent students from obtaining a ride by UWO, any support held by students toward the union will quickly fall.
I applaud the university’s effort in assisting the students, and I, like many Londoners, hope the strike ends soon without holding the students or rest of London hostage in the time being.
If there is more by way of legality that you can add, please do so in the comments section… Thanks.
My Fourth Year of Law School
From the October 2009 issue of Amicus Curiae
Many law students find law school to be so painful that few can understand or relate when I say I actually enjoy the ordeal. They would probably understand even less if I told them that I enjoy it so much that I actually subjected myself to an extra semester of it voluntarily, and not for an LLM.
This is the story of my 2L summer.
I had the opportunity to work for a local law firm during my first year and through my first summer. I had a pleasant enough experience, but I learned all that I could as a law student in that context. For my next summer I decided to do something different.
Most of my time this summer was dedicated to consulting and writing projects. My work projects took me to several locations, including Calgary and B.C. While on the West Coast, I also managed to catch a federal political convention.
Some of my friends outside of law already joke that I do law school on the side. I figured I could probably pick up some legal experience this summer while I was running around. I checked out some summer law abroad programs, and registered for ABA-approved courses at UofT, Bar Ilan in Israel, and Universidad Autonoma de Guadalajara in Mexico.
Before you get any smart ideas, keep in mind that Western doesn’t accept summer transfer credits, even though many other Canadian law schools do. I’m not saying that they should, but if they did I would have graduated before my January term even began. Yes, it was a pretty intense summer.
The trip to Israel had some personal reasons behind it, in addition to my other activities. During my last trip there about 10 years ago I stayed in (primarily Arab) East Jerusalem and the Territories. I enjoyed a rather privileged lifestyle in the primarily Jewish West Jerusalem, staying in Golan resorts overlooking the Galilee, driving through the Negev desert, floating
in the Dead Sea, and swimming on the beaches of Tel Aviv. The tensions within a very complicated country were highlighted with a visit to the assassination site of Yitzak Rabin.
My last summer destination was Mexico. After an unexpected stop in Monterrey when someone decided to have a baby mid-flight, I arrived at my destination in Guadalajara. I soaked up a lot of local culture during my stay including assorted local crafts, Mexican ballet (sans any sign of tutus), Lucha Libra wrestling, and horseback riding along Lake Chapala.
But it seems that politics and law is inescapable no matter where you go. Prime Minister Harper, President Obama, and President Calderon were in town for the North American Leaders’ Summit. Calderon was even staying a few doors down from me at my five-star hotel. One of the major issues on the agenda for them was the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which was becoming increasingly contentious to citizens of all countries during the current economic turbulence.
So what exactly did I study while I was running around the world? Most law abroad programs focus on international legal issues, for obvious reasons, so there were courses on the International Criminal Court, environmental law, international economics and NAFTA, cyberspace law and human rights. But I also got some specialized training in Jewish law, holocaust law, and national security issues that I probably would not get anywhere else.
Some of the faculty I studied with included world-renowned rabbis, someone who worked on the Rome Statute through an NGO, and even the infamous Kenneth Starr from the Clinton-Lewinsky case. Starr held a special session to discuss his role in Proposition 8, the same-sex bill that was shot down in California last year.
There is one key lesson unrelated to my summer courses that I would like to impart and share with others. In the summer of your second year you will typically be applying for your articling position. I was extremely fortunate that it worked out for me, but I would not recommend taking your interview call on a Tel Aviv beach, actually doing the interview on a Mexican cell phone, and skipping the law firm reception entirely to tour a Spanish cathedral.
You’ll have a hard time making an impression and competing with candidates who actually bothered to be in the country to interview in person.
And no matter how many excuses you make, or how many times you show them this article, they’re just not going to buy that someone voluntarily subjected themselves to additional law school that they won’t get credit for.
Why Choose Ivey
Every beginning is a consequence – every beginning ends some thin.
~ Paul Valery
I kid you not; it is 2:52am according to my computer. I just got home from one of those nights that you wish wouldn’t end. I said goodbye to a lot of close friends who graduated today. We laughed, and danced, and drank the night away.
I know that it has been a while since I wrote, and I did not say anything about Ivey’s elective cycle. What could I say? It was an exhilarating six weeks full of simulations, negotiations, presentations, and genuine business opportunities. I enjoyed it very much, and I would have had much to say if my workdays weren’t 12 hours long. But no matter, it was worth it.
Today was convocation, and Ivey’s MBA graduates crossed the stage. As a JD/MBA student, I could not go with them; the nature of my program is, understandably, that I do not get to receive either degree until I complete both. In one year’s time I will finally have my MBA, but I will always remain a proud member of the class of Spring 2009.
Do you want to know the reason why you should choose Ivey for your MBA? It is this: we care about each other.
As you probably know, Ivey’s main competitive advantage is it’s alumni network, but to say it that way sounds cold, unfeeling, and, well, business-like. The truth is that Ivey’s network runs much deeper: it is about fellowship, friendship, and to a certain extent love. Every member of this graduating class has earned my respect and, more importantly, my trust. To a certain extent, each Ivey alumnus now has my respect as well; after all, Ivey’s admission process is rigorous. It was no coincident that this certain group of students was admitted last year, and it was not coincidence in years past; which students make up the next generation will not be a coincidence, either. If you are offered a spot at Ivey, take it because you will fit in. As the career management team is fond of saying, no one gets into Ivey by accidence.
Last week, Ivey held its biannual semi-formal, and I began chatting with a new student. I told him, give your peers your very best and watch as you receive theirs right back. You can learn something from everyone all of the time.
There is not much more that I can write in this blog, except that it will not be my last. You have another year of me, yet, dear reader. With the exception of a few business electives that I must take at the end of the summer to complete my MBA, the rest of my education lies in the faculty of law at Western. However, I am quite suspicious that the rest of my legal education and apprenticeship will symbiotically tied to my time at Ivey.
Congratulations, Class of Spring 2009.
Flexibility, Please
Blame the current economic crisis on too much debt taken on with too little research.
Nobel Prize winning economist Myron Scholes lectured at the University of Western Ontario’s Faculty of Law on March 19, packing the faculty’s largest classroom to overflowing with students, professors and businesspersons curious to know what the Professor (Emeritus) of Finance from Stanford University had to say about today’s financial doldrums.
Scholes, who won the Nobel Prize in 1997 for work on the Black-Scholes Options Pricing Theory, was speaking as part of the Torys LLP Business and Law Pre-Eminent Scholars Series.
When financing operations, business organizations can choose between raising equity by selling shares, or taking on debt. Often they prefer debt financing because interest on debt is tax deductible.
Leading up to the crisis, financial institutions leveraged debt heavily, which means the outcomes, whether positive or negative, would be magnified.
One of the main problems with the current debt market, Scholes suggested, is the debt rating system. Under the current regime, debt that is considered high quality is low risk for investors. By comparison, debt that is rated lower is considered more risky — and with that weighting comes a greater promised rate of return.
Scholes offered several criticisms of the rating system.
First, he suggested that rating agencies use too little data in making their assumptions. The agencies used data from only the last few years and assumed – incorrectly, as it turned out – that housing prices wouldn’t fall. Had agencies used older data, they would have seen different long-term trends.
Secondly, rating agencies assumed that any losses on housing prices would occur idiosyncratically. In other words, their models did not have a built-in contagion or domino effect.
Thirdly, the current rating system suffers from a “cheapest to deliver” problem. Scholes compared the problem to buying wheat. If wheat vendors are only allowed to put up to X amount of sawdust in their wheat, then those vendors will put exactly X amount of sawdust in their wheat. Likewise, when rating agencies specify precisely what criteria will achieve a high rating of, say, AAA, then companies will do just enough to pass that test and no more. Indeed, they will keep pushing the envelope to get away with doing less.
In the future, Scholes said our economies will need a design with more flexibility. Flexibility refers to the ability to protect oneself with financial reserves.
During prosperous times, keeping reserves, such as money in the bank, instead of investing is seen as costly. However, a policy based on the preservation of some flexibility will signal to people that having options is a part of life. By example, carrying an umbrella when it does not rain is burdensome; not carrying an umbrella when it starts to rain is more burdensome. As people become afraid, they build up excess amounts of reserves and money stops flowing through the economy.
Ultimately, Scholes argued that the cost of being reactive is gigantic. Financial and political leaders should think about developing proactive solutions that build flexibility into our economy.
The Torys LLP Business and Law Pre-Eminent Scholars series is one of Western Law’s most popular courses. Each month one of the world’s top legal and business scholars presents a paper in his or her area of expertise to Western law students.
Cross-posted from the Financial Post Executive Blog and the UWO Law site.
Irrational Exhuberance and the Animal Spirits
This post was created and posted in real-time, before the talk was even concluded. For a more detailed article on the same talk see the UWO Law website.
People will always act rationally, right?
That’s the assumption upon which we rest our economic decisions, and one which Dr. Robert Shiller of Yale University is questioning.
Shiller is one of the world’s most well-known economists, and a bestelling author. Several weeks ago, he received the 2009 Deutsche Bank Prize in Financial Economics.
He predicted the 2000 IT bubble burst in the first edition of his book, Irrational Exuberance.
But he also predicted the 2005 housing crisis in his second edition, and outlined a recover plan in Subprime Solution: How the Global Financial Crisis Happened and What To Do About It.
He has a new book though, co-authored with Nobel Prize winner George Akerlof, on Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism.
It was this most recent book that was the topic of his talk at the University of Western Ontario on March 27, 2009. He was working on this book for six years, but decided to released it now given the current economic situation.
John Keynes once said in 1936, in General Theory of Employment Interest and Money,
The outstanding fact is the extreme precarious of the basis of knowledge on whic our estimates of prespective yield have to be made… Most probably, our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be take as a result of animal spirits – of a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction.
Nobody can predict the future. There are many people who pretend that they can, however.
Most actions are affected by what people anticipate will happen, and it’s in these animal spirits that we see the root of this economic crisis.
Postponing building new factories or laying off people leads to another round of problems; they are unable to spend, they tell others of their experiences, and there are ripple effects.
As a result we get into a period of lost opportunity.
Animal spirits are contrary to the thinking of economics, who always want to look to something concrete like the central bank, but it’s usually the animal spirits that drive things.
Real cycle business theory believes that all the drivers of the economy is technological change. Although there is some validity to this like the railroads, it doesn’t explain things like the changes we see today.
Catching Up
Cross-Posted from the Financial Post Executive Blog
I’m surprised how long it’s been since I last wrote; my life has been a whirlwind of activity for the past several weeks. Let me bring you up to speed.
I’d like to start with ‘Obiter Dicta,’ Western Law’s annual charity talent show. The phrase ‘Obiter Dicta’ originates from the legal term for parts of written judgments that aren’t legally binding: it is Latin for ‘by the way.’ Western Law has a lot of talent, and it was a lot of fun to watch the various musical and comedy acts. Each class also makes a video and displays it to the rest of the school. The night is a lot of fun and always one of the big highlights of the year. I even went up on stage to play my guitar for the audience, and I don’t normally like to do that.
What I noticed most during the show were the third year students. For them, the night marked the very last ‘Obiter Dicta’ that they would attend. Near the end of the night, there was a great sense of nostalgia in the air, especially as the student council president got up and blew the audience away with his own law-school cover of Vanilla Ice’s Ice, Ice Baby. Not long ago, I asked a friend of mine who is articling in Toronto whether he’s enjoying working. He looked away for just a moment and responded, “Yes, I really am. But at the same time, my advice to you is to enjoy every moment of law school. It just won’t happen again.” I am sure that at the talent show, the third years were thinking something similar, just as I am sure that those words will be on my mind next year, at my last ‘Obiter Dicta.’
I didn’t have too much time to think about it because I had final exams shortly after. I think I may have mentioned this in a previous blog, but at Western, a joint-degree student’s second year is split between the faculty of law and the Richard Ivey School of Business. I took one night off to attend “Obiter Dicta,” and then I went back to studying for my business exams: marketing, operations, and information technology. Business exams at Ivey all have a very large strategy component to them. In some ways, it is frustrating because as a student you spend so much time studying concepts, only to spend half an exam discussing strategy. On the other hand, I get it: Ivey’s director of recruitment told me once that they try to admit students who seem like they would make good CEOs. The underlying philosophy is clear: Ivey wants its grads not only to understand business concepts, but also to have the ability to apply those concepts to a certain set of facts and make a well-informed decision. I wrote the exams while doing my best to keep that idea in mind.
Exams weren’t the end of the module, either. The next week – last week – my class took part in a marketing simulation, done through a computer program. Teams of students made decisions about what attributes to give products and how best to market those products. The teams were then pitted against each other to grab market share in two hypothetical target segments: one mature, and one new. The simulation required a great amount of decision-making, and an even greater amount of teamwork. It was a lot of fun, a lot of stress, and ultimately (in my opinion) a significant part of the learning experience at Ivey.
Speaking of marketing let me tell you about ICP. All Ivey students are required to work in teams on a pro-bono Ivey Consulting Project (ICP) for a real client; my team developed a marketing plan for a local London business. It was a project that we had been working on since the fall of 2008, but in the last few weeks the work really picked up. On Monday, we handed in our final report. I am pretty satisfied with the results; when we began the project I thought I knew what our recommendations would be. As the project continued, it was incredible to see which ideas were wrong, which ones were right, and which ones were right but for the wrong reasons.
Around the time that SABRE happened, I got an email saying that I was accepted to study abroad next fall at the University of Limerick, in Ireland. I was very happy when I got the news because Ireland was my first choice for exchange. I had visited Dublin before, and had a fantastic time. Did you know that Guinness tastes better over there? Also, going on exchange to Ireland means a great opportunity to spend a few weekends visiting the rest of Europe. I’m really looking forward to the fall semester.
And now I am on reading week. To be honest, I needed the break, but I’m already getting a little restless. I’ve been so busy recently that I didn’t notice how much fun I had. As I tread ever closer to the end of my life as a student, I know that I will remember my friend’s words more. So far, at least, I’m enjoying every moment.
UWO Strike Averted
A strike at the University of Western Ontario has been averted after the school reached an agreement with the union.
The bizarre union – International Union of Operating Engineers (IUOE) Local 772 – is comprised of only 10 members. These 10 employees run the obsolete steam plant which heats both Western and University Hospital. They also keep the tunnels beneath the school nice and toasty warm.
An email was sent to Western students earlier this week to warn of a possible strike and to set out steps to help students avoid disruption of classes and transportation networks. Local 772 would have been in a legal position to strike as of midnight tonight.
Fortunately, Western News reports that a tentative collective bargaining agreement has now been reached, subject to ratification by the Board of Governors.
No word yet on York’s ongoing battle with its TA/Grad Student/Contract Faculty union. It’s an issue we’ve been following for some time now.
See e.g.:
- “We Object!” – The Impossibility of Satisfying Everybody – Dec. 1, 2008
- Classes Resume at Osgoode Hall – Nov. 26, 2008
- CUPE 3903 Strike Update from Osgoode – Nov. 20, 2008
- The Privileged and the Impoverished: Now One and the Same? – Nov. 10, 2008
- Strike Confirmed at York – Nov. 6, 2008
- Yet Another Strike at York University (and Osgoode Hall)? – Nov. 2, 2008
