Dear Law School Community,
Welcome! Despite the ongoing unusual and challenging world circumstances, I hope that you managed to enjoy the summer and are geared up for another active – albeit, different – year at the Faculty of Law.
No doubt you have had and will have a number of questions relating to protocols, procedures and precautions that the Faculty of Law is taking in response to COVID-19. Updates will be disseminated by email, but in addition, all Fall 2020 information will be posted to our Faculty website. From the main landing page, click “Fall 2020 Information” (top banner) and after logging into e.Legal, you will see that information has been categorized into 1L Students, Upper Year & Graduate Students, Faculty and Staff. We hope that you find this aggregation of information to be helpful as we navigate these unprecedented times.
As mentioned in Associate Dean Essert’s email earlier this week, the positive test in our community reminds us all to be vigilant, practice social distancing and hand hygiene, and wear our masks. Anyone who is experiencing COVID-19 symptoms or has reason to think they have been exposed to someone infected should contact the University’s Occupational Health Nurse, get tested, then remain home and participate in their classes remotely.
Turning to non-COVID-19 matters, I’d like to share some updates about our community.
A warm and special welcome to our newest students! The JD Class of 2023, not surprisingly, is another exceptional and diverse cohort of students, who have already demonstrated their resilience as our first class to go through Orientation & Legal Methods in a hybrid format. I hope that you are all settling in nicely at the Faculty of Law; my colleagues and I look forward to getting to know you over the next few years. If you haven’t already, take a look at the profile of the class. I’m sure you’ll agree that they’re an impressive group!
I’m delighted as well to welcome all our graduate, returning and transfer students to the Faculty of Law. This year’s graduate students hail from all corners of the globe, including Australia, New Zealand, India, China, Singapore, Chile, Argentina, Israel, Ghana and Nigeria. To give you a better sense of their talents, our seven incoming SJD students were chosen from 110 applicants, and our 35 LLM students were chosen from 270 applicants from leading law schools around the world. They are a remarkably accomplished group who could have elected to complete their graduate studies anywhere, and we are gratified that they chose U of T. Some students will be studying from their home countries, and others locally, but best wishes to all for a successful transition to your graduate studies.
I’m looking forward to welcoming the GPLLM students this upcoming weekend. A silver lining of having moved courses online is that we now have students joining us virtually from across Canada. As always, the class will be filled with a number of international students, including from Brazil, Ghana, India, and Romania, which contributes to the richness and diversity of the GPLLM classroom. Our GPLLM students have, on average, 12-15 years of work experience from a variety of industries and sectors, including pharmaceutical, education, financial services, insurance, music, and healthcare to name a few.
Over the past two weeks, we have hosted very successful, hybrid orientation programs. A big thank you to all the volunteers who contributed to the JD program’s O-Week, including especially the student coordinators, Branden Cave, Thryn Irwin, and Meruba Sivaselvachandran; as well as our Student Life and inclusivity Program Manager, Sara-Marni Hubbard, and our Experiential Education Manager, Kim Snell. Also, a big thanks to the Graduate Program team for their efforts planning the orientation for LLM and SJD students. I know it takes much time and effort to plan orientation events, especially in a new format. Your contributions are very much appreciated.
This summer expanded the Faculty’s tradition of hiring law students for summer work. As in past years, students were employed through the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering’s Hatchery Internship, Gerald W. Schwartz Summer Fellowship Program, Donner Civic Leadership Fund Fellowship, June Callwood Program in Aboriginal Law - Indigenous Community Fellowships, Future of Law–Blue J Legal Fellowship, and others (you can read about the Faculty’s internship opportunities here). In addition, in response to the negative impact that COVID-19 had on summer employment, the law school created 58 three-week paid Research Assistantships. I am thrilled that we were able to offer meaningful law-related professional summer work opportunities to a number of our students, and I thank our faculty members for their generosity in contributing their grant money to fund this program.
We are very excited to be launching two new programs this year. First, the Investor Protection Clinic (IPC), made possible by a generous donation from the Honourable Hal Jackman, provides free legal services and public legal education to members of vulnerable communities who are at risk of suffering harm, or may have suffered harm, relating to their investments. The IPC will provide law students with unique experiential learning opportunities through assisting clients with their legal claims, developing and delivering public legal education, and collaborating with regulators and key stakeholders on policy projects and litigation. A warm welcome to Ivy Lam, our alumna, who is the inaugural director of the clinic.
Second, also because of Hal Jackman’s generosity, I am delighted to announce the launch of The Future of Law Lab. It will provide a broad range of opportunities for students, academics, lawyers and other professionals to explore the intersection of law, innovation and technology. The Lab’s activities focus on several related themes: how technology and innovation are changing legal practice; how technology and innovation are changing substantive law; and how innovative, design thinking can change the practice and substance of law. Welcome to Joshua Morrison, who is the Lab’s first director, and will be working in the coming months with our community, including Faculty advisor Anthony Niblett, to develop programming associated with these and other themes. Stay tuned!
We are very excited that the Black Future Lawyers (BFL) program, which offers supports and engagement opportunities to Black undergraduate students who aspire to go to law school, now has 350 undergraduate members and recently launched three new chapters at chapters at McMaster, York, and Western University. We are looking forward to launching the new Black Student Application Process (BSAP) this term. The goal of Law BSAP is to break down some of the barriers that Black students may experience through the law school application process.
We once again ran the summer Law School Access Program (LSAP), which is a free LSAT prep course for high-potential, low income students. This was our first time running the program online. This enabled us to increase the number of participants to 40, which included 12 participants in the Black Future Lawyers program. The program has helped a large number of students over the years successfully navigate the path to law school, here (including three new students!) and elsewhere. Thank you to our generous sponsor, BLG LLP, as well as Alexis Archbold, Sara Faherty, Jerome Poon-Ting, Rejeanne Puran, without whom the LSAP would not be possible. Thank you also to our student instructor, Mitchell Hayes (2L), who did an exceptional job converting the program to a virtual offering, and guest instructor Jordyn Selznik (1L). We wish all participants the best of luck as they prepare to write the LSAT this Fall.
Our Lawyers Doing Cool Things with Their Law Degrees will kick off on September 28th, with alumna Amir Torabi, JD 2016, Director, Legal & Government Affairs and Legal Counsel with the Toronto Blue Jays. We have a total of seven exciting speakers lined up for the Fall term. You can read their bios and register to attend on our website. All sessions will be held via Zoom.
Both Lawyers Doing Cool Things, and our alumni mentorship program (look out for an email about this soon), are two great opportunities to connect with our fantastic alumni. I also encourage you to participate in the Dean’s Leadership Lunch Series. The first guest of the academic year will be Jean Fraser, a trail-blazing business lawyer and former managing partner at Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP (September 15th); followed by David Shore, producer and writer of House and The Good Doctor (October 1st). An email about this, with registration links, went out last week. For Fall, the “lunches” will be virtual.
The Fall 2020 lineup of Leadership Skills Program workshops is now online and registration is open. Check out the great workshops to build core skills such as clear communication, teamwork, and networking. The LSP is an excellent opportunity to hone these important soft skills.
We are very pleased to continue to partner with the Rotman School of Management to give our 2L and 3L students access to Rotman’s excellent pre-MBA online courses in accounting, finance, and statistics. 1Ls are welcome to participate after final exams finish in April. For more formation about the Rotman@Law Certificate Program, please click here.
While this is usually the time when I invite you to mark your calendars for the Grand Moot, one of the Faculty’s premier events, held in the Fall. This year, the Grand Moot will be pushed to the Winter term, in the hope that we’ll be able to have a larger in-person component. Stay tuned for further details.
Mental health and wellness is especially important in these difficult times. Over the past year, we have been working on some significant changes to our student mental health program. Those include creating a new Student Mental Health and Wellness Program Manager role, who is responsible for leading our ongoing efforts to foster a supportive and healthy work and learning environment at the law school; and, partnering with the central Health & Wellness to provide dedicated mental health counselling to law students at the law school. We are excited to welcome Terry Gardiner, our new Student Mental Health and Wellness Program Manager, and Charlie Williams, our new embedded counsellor. We have been grateful for students’ patience through the transition to our new model, and look forward to continuing collaborative discussions about student mental health.
In closing, I want to express my appreciation for faculty and staff who have worked incredibly hard this summer in preparation for the launch of a hybrid law program. It has been an enormous, collaborative project that I have every confidence will result in an academic experience that delivers the exceptional quality of education for which our Faculty is known. I am incredibly proud of our faculty and staff’s commitment to the law school and our students. Thank you for your tremendous efforts! I also want to thank you, our student community, for your past and continued patience, understanding and collaborative spirit as we work through these unprecedented circumstances.
I also want to express my gratitude to a large number of alumni and other supporters who supported the Campaign for Excellence without Barriers. Thanks to their generosity, the Campaign exceeded its targets, raising over $37 million in donations to enhance the student experience, including over $22 million for student financial aid. With matching funds from the University, the total impact of the campaign is nearly $53 million, with an almost $40 million impact on student financial aid. By contributing their time and expertise in a host of ways, as well as their financial support, there is no question that our alumni community is an indispensable pillar of the Faculty’s success.
As you may know, this will be my final term as dean. It has been an honour and a pleasure to serve this wonderful institution in this capacity. I am especially proud of our community’s ability to navigate and overcome the immense challenges of the past six months.
Wishing you an academic year filled with intellectual growth, fun and good health.
Best,
Ed
Edward Iacobucci (LLB 1996)
Dean and James M. Tory Professor of Law
