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.
The centre received a generous seed grant from the Law Foundation of Ontario to fund its start-up operation in 2008-2009. Jane Kidner, the faculty's assistant dean for external relations, was seconded as CLP's executive director. The centre also established an advisory board of 15 members from all walks of the profession and an academic council made up of faculty from other Canadian law schools who are researching and teaching on the legal profession.
The centre aims to leave its mark in three ways.
First, as an academic body, we hope to stimulate research, teaching and debate. On April 4, the centre hosted its inaugural annual symposium, which addressed the provocative question, "Can Legal Ethics Be Taught?" For those in suspense, the answers can be found in the symposium report, available on CLP's website at: http://www.law.utoronto.ca/programs/clp.html.
The centre recently collaborated with Community Legal Education Ontario (CLEO) for a two day conference on Community Legal Practice in a Diverse Ontario. While the symposium on teaching legal ethics explored the nexus between legal education and legal professionalism, the CLEO conference focused more on strategies for getting relevant legal knowledge into the hands of community organizers and NGOs who could put them to work. More than 200 people attended the event, held at U of T's conference facility at 89 Chestnut.
Future workshops and conferences are planned on the topics of The Evolving Role of the Government Lawyer, Lifelong Learning in Professionalism and Heroes and Villains of the Legal Profession.
The centre is also interested in communicating ideas about professionalism is a variety of media. This year we have partnered with the Jackman Humanities Institute to put on the Law, Ethics and Film series, which will feature discussions led by academics and lawyers interested in the intersection of popular culture and professionalism.
Additionally, the centre has plans for a working paper series and a photography exhibition at the law school and is working to establish an academic network of scholars working in the area of the legal profession. The centre is working with U of T's Centre for Ethics to establish links between scholars' research professionalism across disciplines, for example at the Rotman School of Management, the Joint Centre for Bioethics and the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering. This focus also emphasizes the interdisciplinary nature of the centre's work. The foremost scholar on the legal profession at the University of Toronto, Ronit Dinovitzer, hails not from the Faculty of Law but from the Department of Sociology and is now a member of the centre's academic council.
The second way in which the centre hopes to make its mark is through providing professional education opportunities to lawyers. In response to a call for proposals from the Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration, and working with Jane Price, the Faculty of Law's director of professional diversity and legal opportunities, the centre prepared an extensive proposal for a bridging program for internationally trained lawyers that would include skills training, career-related support and counselling and cultural fluency workshops to assist international lawyers with the accreditation process and transition to the Canadian workplace.We expect to hear back in a few months. We are also working to develop a summer institute for in-depth, hands-on education for lawyers in particular spheres of practice.
The third pillar of the centre's activities is our networking role. A university-based centre is uniquely placed to convene discussions, connect kindred spirits and bridge professional divides. For example, on Sept. 19, the centre sponsored a lunch at the student leaders forum, organized by the faculty's career development office. We heard great ideas from the students on how the centre can serve as a liaison between the faculty's student-led initiatives and the lawyers in those fields.
While lawyers are held in low esteem (and perhaps getting lower), there is another story about the profession that is too often not told. Pro bono initiatives (where lawyers offer their services for no charge to those in need in order to foster access to justice) are growing in number and ambition. To give just one example, Pro Bono Law Ontario, Justice for Children and Youth and the Hospital for Sick Children have collaborated on the first legal assistance centre designed to address the legal challenges of children with medical problems and their families. Based on a pilot program in a Boston hospital, the medical and legal benefits can be enormous (for example, if a child comes into a hospital with respiratory problems because the landlord has turned off the heat in the building the child lives in, simply treating the respiratory problem without addressing the landlord-tenant problem is unlikely to lead to a positive health outcome).
With close to 90 per cent of U of T law students engaged in pro bono activities through Pro Bono Students Canada and similar numbers at other law schools (Osgoode Hall Law School has become the first Canadian school to introduce a compulsory public interest requirement of at least 40 hours of work in the community), the profession is under increasing pressure to live up to the public service expectations of the students who represent the future of the profession. This is the kind of story the centre wishes to tell, and to be a part of, in the future.