CONFERENCE: The Future of Law School

Conference Announcement
The Future of Law School
 
September 26 - 28, 2013
University of Alberta Faculty of Law
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

REGISTRATION IS NOW OPEN AT: http://www.lawschool.ualberta.ca/centenary/conference.aspx

CONFIRMED SPEAKERS INCLUDE:

- Professor Harry Arthurs, Dean Emeritus, Osgoode Hall Law School
- Dean Kim Brooks, Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University
- Dean Irwin Chemerinsky, California Irvine School of Law
- Dean Ian Holloway, University of Calgary, Faculty of Law
- Professor William Henderson, Indiana Maurer School of Law
- Professor Rosalie Jukier, McGill University, Faculty of Law
- Professor Carrie Menkel-Meadow, California Irvine School of Law
- Dean Lorne Sossin, Osgoode Hall Law School
- Professor Richard Susskind OBE, Independent Scholar & Advisor, UK
- Professor Margaret Thornton, Australian National University, College of Law
- Hugh Verrier, Chair, White & Case LLP

PLACE & PURPOSE: The culminating event to the Faculty of Law Centenary, this Conference is ideally timed to solicit a wide professional, judicial, academic and public response. Witness the 2007 Carnegie Report Educating Lawyers that issued strong criticism of professional legal education and that has had a profound and continuing impact throughout the common law world; the 2009 Federation of Law Societies of Canada's Report on the Common Law Degree in Canada; and the installation of the Legal Education and Training Review (LETR) in the UK: the Law School and the Profession it supplies are being criticized from without and contested from within as never before and their futures are now, as never before, very much up for grabs. Indeed, it wouldn't be hyperbole to suggest that this unprecedented contest has risen to the status of a cultural war, within the legal academy and the profession and among the wider public, over the future of law school, of lawyers, and with that, of the law itself.

This Conference is dead set on contributing loudly and meaningfully to this cultural battle. Leading legal thinkers -- academic and practicing lawyers and judges -- are coming together in Edmonton to state the case against the present and for the future, before members of the international common law legal community and before the public at large. The Conference will be structured around the following four themes:

- Foundations: Theories of Contemporary Professional Legal Education
- Circumstances: Law Schools, Regulators, and the Market for Legal Services
- Challenges: Reflecting Changes in the Practice of Law
- Practices: Innovating the Content and Delivery of Legal Education

Wherever you are placed in the legal community, if you find yourself disgruntled by the present legal education and committed to its renewal, you mustn't miss this Conference.