All JD students are invited to join one or more of the Student Health and Wellness Committee working groups. The working groups were established by the Student Health and Wellness Committee and are open to all JD students.

How to signup: 

Send an email to sara.hubbard@utoronto.ca indicating which working group(s) you're interested in. Please email by November 8^th, 2016. After the deadline, Sara-Marni will email everyone who signed up to set up meetings.

Working Groups

Peer Mental Health Program

Art Show

Mental Health and the Law Conference

Athletics and Nutrition 

Quiet Room Furniture and Art 

Community Building
                -Skills sharing

Student Social Space (student lounge) 

Health and Wellness/Mental Health Speaker Series

LAW & ECONOMICS WORKSHOP SERIES
presents 

Yun-chien Chang
Institutum Iurisprudentiae, Academia Sinica (Taiwan) 

Do Parties Negotiate After Trespass Litigation?
An Empirical Study of Cosaean Bargaining

Tuesday, November 15, 2016
4:10 – 5.45
Solarium (room FA2) - Falconer Hall
84 Queen's Park 

The Coase theorem critically depends on the assumption that parties will bargain after litigation and, barring high transaction costs, mis-allocated entitlements by courts will be re-allocated through voluntary exchanges. Behavioral law and economics theory challenges this view. Ward Farnsworth’s 1999 informal small-scale survey lent credence to the claim that parties do not bargain after litigation because of the endowment effect and the animosity created by litigation. Farnsworth’s sample is small and statistically biased. Yet no other article has tested whether parties in the real world would systematically fail to bargain because of behavioral reasons. This paper examines over 300 Taiwanese cases in which the landowner sued the illicit possessor for building a structure on the plaintiff’s property. We studied how often the landowner registered a sale of property to the possessor after the litigation. We found that it happened in about 5% of cases. We apply a logistic regression analysis to the results and are able to identify some factors that make successful bargaining more likely: the values of land and buildings, the number of plaintiffs and defendants, and defendant attorney representation. This suggests that post-litigation bargaining dynamics are at least partly rational — allocative efficiency and transaction costs (conventionally defined) still matter. 

Professor Yun-chien Chang is an Associate Research Professor at Institutum Iurisprudentiae, Academia Sinica, Taiwan, and serves as the Co-Director of its Empirical Legal Studies Center. He was a visiting professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Haifa University, and Rotterdam Institute of Law and Economics. His current academic interests focus on economic, empirical, and comparative analysis of property law and land use law, as well as empirical studies of the judicial system.  Prof. Chang’s English articles have appeared in, among others, JLS, JLA, JLEO, JELS, SCER as well as law reviews published by Chicago, Notre Dame and Iowa. He has published a prize-winning monograph, Private Property and Takings Compensation(Edward Elgar) and (co-)edited Empirical Legal Analysis (Routledge), Law and Economics of Possession (Cambridge University Press), Private Law in China and Taiwan (Cambridge University Press). Property and Trust Law in Taiwan (Wolter Kluwers), a co-authored book, will be published in 2016.  Prof. Chang received his J.S.D. and LL.M. degree from New York University School of Law. Before going to NYU, Prof. Chang had earned LL.B. and LL.M. degrees at National Taiwan University and passed the Taiwan bar.

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

CONSTITUTIONAL ROUNDTABLE

presents 

Claudia Geiringer
Victoria University Wellington School of Law

The Strange Antipodean Afterlife of John Hart Ely’s Democracy and Distrust 

Wednesday, November 16, 2016
12:30 – 2:00
Solarium (Room FA2), Falconer Hall
84 Queen’s Park 

This paper tells the strange, and little known, story of how John Hart Ely’s process-perfecting theory of constitutional interpretation (of the United States Constitution) became a blueprint for the design of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. The paper reflects on Ely’s antipodean afterlife as an instance of the migration of constitutional ideas. It examines the processes of de- and re-contextualization by which Ely's theory was remodelled and repurposed, during the process of migration, in order to re-fit it for the new legal system. And it suggests that this process of transmogrification augmented the problems of coherence already associated with Ely's theory.  The paper will be of relevance both to those constitutional theorists with an interest in the coherence and legitimacy of process theories generally, and to scholars of comparative constitutional law, who care about the pathways by which constitutional ideas migrate between legal systems. 

Professor Claudia Geiringer holds the Chair in Public Law at Victoria University of Wellington School of Law, and is the Co-Director of the New Zealand Centre of Public Law. Her research interests include the constitutional protection of human rights in New Zealand and comparator Commonwealth nations, the laws and procedures of Parliament, and the domestic reception of international law. She currently holds a grant from the Royal Society of New Zealand to write a book on the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. 

Prof. Kent Roach will offer a commentary reflecting on the influence of John Hart Ely in thinking about the Charter and in particular equality rights. 

A light lunch will be provided. 

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

INNOVATION LAW & POLICY WORKSHOP presents

Dan Burk, University of California, Irvine, School of Law

On the Sociology of Patenting

Thursday, November 24, 2016

12:30 p.m. - 2:00 p.m.

Solarium (Room FA2), Falconer Hall

84 Queen's Park

Please register, by sending an email to: centre.ilp@utoronto.ca.

burk_sociologypatent.pdf

Join the Law and Politics Club for an analysis of the US presidential election results. Our speakers - Professor Matthew Lebo and Professor Clifford Orwin - will comment on the defining phenomena of the election, explain key outcomes, and discuss the impact this election will have on the future of American politcs. The speakers will also take questions from the audience.

The event will take place from 12:30pm - 2:00pm. Food will be provided. Location: Jackman Hall, Room J130.

We hope to see you there!

Date: November 17, 2016

Time: 12:30-2pm

Location: P115

The IHRP presents:

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 2016

6:00-8:00pm

University of Toronto Faculty of Law

Jackman Law Building, Room J130

Moderated by DR. NANCY NICOL

Speakers: CALEB OROZCO, United Belize Advocacy Movement (UniBAM); and

STEPHEN LEWIS, Co-Director, AIDS-Free World

On August 10, 2016, Caleb Orozco achieved the first-ever successful court challenge to a Caribbean anti-sodomy law. This remarkable accomplishment has sent shock waves across the region where nine other jurisdictions still retain anti-sodomy laws, largely imposed during British colonization. Caleb will provide an enthusiastic presentation on the work that led up to this ground-breaking case, the status of the appeal by the Government of Belize, and how the global north can effectively assist with the ongoing Caribbean LGBTQI liberation effort.

EVENT POSTER

Centre for Ethics and OISE Social Justice Education

University of Toronto

Obligations under non-ideal circumstances: The case of tenure-line professors

Harry Brighouse

Department of Philosophy and Educational Policy Studies

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Monday, November 14, 2016

4:00  - 6:00 pm

Room 200, Larkin Building

15 Devonshire Place

Harry Brighouse is professor of Philosophy and of Educational Policy Studies at University of Wisconsin-Madison. His major current project within political philosophy is working out the place of the family in egalitarian liberalism. His main project within education is an exploration of a number of school reform ideas.

Abstract:

Professor Brighouse will provide an overview of the role of elite colleges and universities in society. He will argue that, far from being engines of social mobility, they contribute to unjust inequality of opportunity. Professors at such institutions are unavoidably implicated and complicit in this role. He will argue for reforms in the role of professors at elite colleges and university and, more radically, that even in the absence of such reform individual professors are obliged to make considerable changes in their professional activities, even at considerable risk to their professional advancement.

Ethics at Noon with Rahul Kumar

Saving Lives and Statistical Deaths

Rahul Kumar

Department of Philosophy

Queen’s University

Wednesday, November 16, 2016
12:00 PM - 2:00 PM

Room 200, Larkin Building
15 Devonshire Place

Rahul Kumar is professor in the Department of Philosophy, Queen’s University, and Executive Editor of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy. He is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Ethics.

Professor Kumar’s principal research interest is in contemporary moral theory and, in particular, the development and exploration of the implications of a plausible non-consequentialist approach to understanding moral reasoning for both issues, between rival moral theories and for substantive issues in normative moral and political philosophy.

Freshfields “Step Into The Sunshine” event will take place from February 10 to February 12, 2017 in Miami, and is geared towards German and Austrian LL.M. (or other degree) students in the US and Canada. Main parts of the agenda include a workshop on negotiation management, plenty of time for personal conversations to get to know Freshfields and the other participants, as well as outdoor activities in and around Miami. 

Application deadline is December 4, 2016. 

freshfields_step_into_the_sunshine_miami_2017.pdf

The Toronto Public Library is expanding its popular Museum and Arts Pass (MAP) program to include U of T students who are 18 and over.

Students can request a MAP booklet at the OISE, Engineering & Computer Science, Gerstein, UTSC, UTM and Robarts libraries and take it into one of five participating TPL branches to ‘sign out’ their MAP pass to one of the four venues. Each Student MAP pass, which can be used until April 30, is good for two people. The booklets will be handed out at the participating U of T libraries from October 18 to January 31 or until they run out.

The pass is good for free admission for two to any one of four participating MAP venues: the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Bata Shoe Museum, City of Toronto Historic Sites and the Textile Museum of Canada.

Find out more.