Lawyers Doing Cool Things - Laura McGee, J.D. 2014

Management consultant at McKinsey & Company

Career profile: Laura McGee is a management consultant at McKinsey & Company. Her focus areas include diversity & inclusion, economic growth, and technology & innovation. Her clients include national governments, cross-border advisory groups and Fortune 500 companies. While not a practicing lawyer, she draws on her legal background when developing growth strategy and helping clients navigate political and regulatory change. 

Monday March 19, 2018, 12:30 – 2:00

Room TBD

Sandwiches and water will be provided.

To register, click here. 

First year students are invited to learn about course selection in the upper years.  Please join us in J250 to learn about upper year requirements, pre- and co-requisites, and other advice on selecting courses in the upper years.  You can find out how clinics, moots, journals, and other upper year programs work, and also master the nuts and bolts of our course selection system. 

We look forward to seeing you on Tuesday, March 13th at 12:30 in the Moot Court Room!

Come and enjoy a cupcake and help us warm the new student lounge. 

Monday March 5th, 12:30-until all the cupcakes are gone. 

Access the new lounge by taking the stairs off the Rowell Room, the Flavelle House elevator to the basement, or the tunnel from Jackman to Flavelle. 

THE JAMES HAUSMAN TAX LAW & POLICY WORKSHOP
presents

Bridget Crawford
Pace University Elisabeth Haub School of Law

Tax Talk and Reproductive Technology 

Wednesday, March 14, 2018
12:30 - 2:00
Solarium (room FA2), Falconer Hall
84 Queen's Park

What do the busiest fertility clinics in the United States communicate to their clients about the tax consequences of so-called human egg “donation”?  As in Canada, the purchase of human ova is illegal in the United States. Nevertheless, it is an open and common practice for an egg providers, aided by a fertility clinic, to contract with intended parents for substantial remuneration. How do egg providers understand their remuneration vis-a-vis the tax system?  How does that understanding square with existing tax laws in the U.S. and Canada? Through a content analysis of publicly-available websites and internet message boards, this paper examines the tax information that U.S. fertility clinics and doctors make available to patients, as well as the information that compensated egg providers share with each other. The paper demonstrates that correct and reliable tax information is in short supply, and there is a need for clear administrative or judicial guidance. Perez v. Commissioner, a case recently decided by the United States Tax Court, represented an opportunity for the court to clarify important questions about the nature, extent and character of income received from compensation associated with human egg transfers. Including tax considerations in discussions of reproductive technology brings focus to underlying economic issues and invites a more complex consideration of the interests of doctors, clinics, intended parents and donors in this robust market.

Bridget J. Crawford is the James D. Hopkins Professor of Law at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University in White Plains, New York.  She graduated from Yale University (B.A.), the University of Pennsylvania Law School (J.D.), and Griffith University (Ph.D.) in Australia. At Pace Law School, Professor Crawford teaches courses related to taxation, inheritance, corporate law and feminist legal theory.  She is the co-editor, with Kathryn M. Stanchi and Linda L. Berger, of the U.S. Feminist Judgments Project, a collective effort to rewrite from a feminist perspective major decisions of a variety of United States courts. This new form of socio-legal scholarship was first advanced by a group of Canadian lawyers and scholars who call themselves the Women’s Court of Canada. The Canadian project has been or will be replicated in England, Ireland, Scotland, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, India, the United States, and a pan-European project.  Professor Crawford is a member of the American Law Institute and the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel. She is the Editor of the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel Law Journal. Professor Crawford is the former chair of the American Association of Law Schools Section on Women in Legal Education and the American Association of Law Schools Section on Trusts & Estates. She is the editor of the Feminist Law Professors blog, a regular contributor to the Faculty Lounge blog, and one of 26 law professors profiled in the book by Michael Hunter Schwartz et al., What the Best Law Teachers Do, published by Harvard University Press. Her publications include Critical Tax Theory: An Introduction (Cambridge 2009); Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Opinions of the United States Supreme Court (Cambridge 2016); Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Tax Opinions (Cambridge 2017); and “Tampon Taxes, Discrimination and Human Rights,” 2017 Wisc. L. Rev. 491 (with Carla Spivack).

A light lunch will be served.

For more workshop information, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca.

 Regulating Safe and Healthy Food? Food labeling and the new Safe Food for Canadians Regulations

Have you ever wondered why manufacturers can divide up sugars on a list of ingredients or why soy milk is sometimes labeled as a soy “beverage”? Do you ever worry about the safety of your food or who gets to decide what food is "safe"?  What about the legal implications of food recalls and the rights of consumers? If so, please join the Food Law and Policy Society and experts Sara Zborovski (Norton Rose) and Glenford Jameson (G.S. Jameson & Company) for a conversation about regulating safe and healthy food in Canada, the implications of the new Safe Food for Canadians regulations and changes to labeling provisions. 

food_labelling_panel.pdf

The University of Toronto Technology and Intellectual Property Group is pleased to present a panel on the legal implications of gene editing and CRISPR.  Speakers are:

Jordan Scopa (Goodmans)

Zarya Cynader (Gilberts)

Ben Wallwork (Norton Rose)

Jamie Holtom (McCarthys)

Lunch will be provided.

Date: Tuesday, March 13^th

Time: 12:30 – 2:00 pm

Location: J130

What are the risks related to the trend of increasingly technocratic governance? How might it enable the commercialization of the public service? How can government respond to this mounting digital and data-driven consensus?

Wed, Mar 14, 2018
04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
Rm 200, Larkin Building

See the Family Care Office website for more information.

Sentencing in many jurisdictions remains quite discretionary, with significant variability in how judges approach otherwise similar cases, raising concerns of both arbitrariness and bias. This paper proposes systematizing judgments of proportionality in sentencing by means of an algorithm. The aim of such an algorithm would be to predict what a typical judge in that jurisdiction would regard as a proportionate sentence in a particular case. Notably, unlike most discussions of algorithmic decision-making in the criminal law, the objective of the algorithm would be on predicting the behavior of judges rather than defendants. I show that endorsing such an algorithm does not come at the cost of case-specific justice, that it is consistent with a highly particularistic account of moral judgment, and that it is attractive even despite pervasive uncertainty as to the point of punishment.

Vincent Chiao
Law & Criminology
University of Toronto

04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
Rm 200, Larkin Building 

Nietzsche’s Rhetoric and the Politics of Possibility

This talk addresses the question of Nietzsche’s style and presents a reading of Nietzsche’s use of rhetoric as inseparable from his philosophical project. I provide an exegesis of Nietzsche’s own reflections on rhetoric and attend to its actual deployment. In doing so, I highlight the underexplored themes of receptivity and dissonance. I challenge common interpretations by arguing that Nietzsche’s rhetoric is neither deployed as a means to get at some unitary whole, nor is it evidence of an embrace of indeterminism. Nor yet does its significance reside only in relation to Nietzsche’s perspectivism. Rather, Nietzsche’s rhetoric, I argue, is often deliberately dissonant and oriented toward facilitating receptive effects. The aim is to alter the conditions of possibility. I conclude by suggesting that Nietzsche’s rhetoric has implications for critical theory, shifting how we might view critical political engagement in the public sphere. 

Simon Lambek
Centre for Ethics & Department of Political Science
University of Toronto

Wed, Mar 7, 2018
12:30 PM - 02:00 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
Rm 200, Larkin Building

The Algebra of Partiality

Most people agree that we are permitted to do more for those with whom we stand in certain special relationships, subject to several constraints. But most also agree that the presence of partiality does not eliminate our more general moral reasons to others. In some cases, however, these two sets of reasons must be compared; thus, we need to know how these two sets of reasons weigh against each other. But just how much extra weight can partiality justify?

Jeremy Davis
Centre for Ethics & Department of Philosophy
University of Toronto

Wed, Mar 14, 2018
12:30 PM - 02:00 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
Rm 200, Larkin Building