Legal Ethics

The Faculty of Law, with the University of Toronto's Department of Public Health Sciences and Joint Centre for Bioethics, has initiated a seminar series on "Public Health Ethics, Law and Policy."

The inaugural seminar was held on the subject of "Differing Perspectives on the Gardasil/HPV-Vaccination Program in Ontario" at the Faculty of Law on March 20, 2008. It featured the following speakers:

• Vinita Dubey, Associate Medical Officer of Health, Division of Communicable Diseases, Toronto Public Health
• Anne Rochon Ford, Coordinator, Women and Health Protection Working Group
• Angus Dawson, Visiting Faculty Fellow, Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
• Joanna Erdman, Co-Director, International Reproductive and Sexual Health Law Programme
• CHAIR, Trudo Lemmens, Associate Professor, Faculties of Law and Medicine

This seminar is now available to be viewed as a webcast.

Click here to watch the seminar over the web.

On April 4, 2008, the new Centre for Professionalism, Ethics and Public Service hosted a major symposium, "Can Legal Ethics be Taught?", that brought together leading experts to discuss the teaching of legal ethics.

All sessions from this symposium were recorded on video and can now be viewed over the web.

Click here to watch the webcast of "Can Legal Ethics be Taught?"

This commentary was first published in the University of Toronto Bulletin on October 28, 2008.

A year ago, a new book entitled Lawyers Are Rats made the cover of Maclean's (the book is about "how lawyers became greedy, unprincipled enablers of the rich"). Around this same time, Hollinger's lawyer was convicted, along with Conrad Black, of fraud, and the treasurer of the Law Society of Upper Canada was suspended for sleeping with a client. This was not a high point for the legal profession. It was at this moment, however, that the University of Toronto's Faculty of Law took the bold step of establishing a new Centre for the Legal Profession (CLP).

The goal of this new centre is to broaden and deepen our understanding of professionalism, ethics and public service and the relationship between them.We seek to provide a forum and to serve as a catalyst for dialogue about the capacities, judgment and actions necessary for effective lawyering. To achieve these goals, we are bringing together leading voices from the academic, practice, judicial and public interest communities. The centre also capitalizes on the expertise within the Faculty of Law, the broader University of Toronto and the legal community in Ontario and beyond and seeks to deploy these resources in order to forge a stronger link between the study of law, the practice of law and the implications of law.