Mayor Brian Bowman will deliver the Goodman Lecture, on Appropriate Responses to the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Thursday, November 24th at 4:10 PM in Room P120..

Since becoming Mayor, Bowman has passionately worked towards fixing Winnipeg’s racism problem – changing the city’s label by Maclean’s magazine as “most racist city in Canada” to “a leader in fixing Canada’s racism problem” in the span of one year. Mayor Bowman himself is Métis, and is the nation’s first Aboriginal mayor.

Please join us in Jackman Law Building, Room P120 on the afternoon of Thursday, November 24th at 4:10 PM.

LAW & ECONOMICS WORKSHOP SERIES

presents 

Jennifer Bennett Shinall
Vanderbilt University Law School 

Opting Out and the Division of Marital Assets 

Tuesday, November 1, 2016
4:10 – 5.45
Solarium (room FA2) - Falconer Hall
84 Queen's Park  

The legal regime governing divorce and allocation of marital assets has substantial effects on numerous dimensions of marriage including decisions to marry, divorce, save, allocate resources, and participate in the labor market. Prenuptial contracts remain rare, so marital assets in most divorces are divided according to state laws, which requires equitable division in thirty-nine states and equal division in the remaining eleven states. Legal decisionmakers in states requiring equitable division consider each party’s current earnings and future earnings potential, balancing the contributions of each party to building the value of tangible assets and to the household. Drawing on economic theories of marriage and divorce, the share of marital assets awarded to a non-breadwinning spouse should be positively related to her education. The investments in her spouse’s human capital should lead to the 50 – 50 split associated with equal division allocation, as that allocation is based on the assumption of equal partnership and equal rewards. To test whether the general population agrees with these economic arguments, we fielded an experimental vignette study on 3,017 volunteers, asking them to divide the marital assets equitably between a breadwinning husband and non-breadwinning wife. We varied the education level of the non-breadwinning wife as well as the value of the marital estate. We find that subjects consistently favor the husband, with less than 50 percent of assets awarded to the wife, regardless of the wife’s education level and the level of marital assets. Male subjects also consistently award lower shares than female subjects. However, male subjects, but not female subjects, award a larger share to the more educated wife. Similar to the marriage premium that favors men, we find that asset division upon divorce likewise favors men. 

Jennifer Bennett Shinall’s research interests are employment law, labor economics, and legal and economic history. Her research examines the effects of obesity on the labor market and how the legal system can address these effects. Other current research focuses on the employment effects of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments Act of 2008, and implicit forms of discriminatory bias against women. Professor Shinall was the first graduate of the Ph.D. Program in Law and Economics at Vanderbilt University. Before returning to Vanderbilt as a Postdoctoral Research Scholar in Law and Economics in 2013, Professor Shinall was a clerk for Judge John Tinder of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. She earned an A.B. in economics and history at Harvard University and her J.D. and Ph.D. in law and economics at Vanderbilt Law School, where she served as senior articles editor for Vanderbilt Law Review and was elected to the Order of the Coif. Professor Shinall teaches Employment Law and Employment Discrimination Law to J.D. students. She also teaches Labor Markets and Human Resources and the Ph.D. Workshop for the Ph.D. Program in Law and Economics.

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

Join us for the third meeting of the LGBTQ+ Workshop. In this workshop, SJD Candidate Haim Abraham will present his paper "A Family is What You Make It: Legal Recognition of Multiple Parents - A Comparative Analysis".

On Wednesday, November 16^th from 5:00 to 6:00 P.M. in room J140, Justice Patrick Boyle of the Tax Court of Canada will be coming to the Faculty of Law to talk about the TCC Clerkship Program for 2018-2019. This may seem early, but the application deadline for the program is coming up in January 2017.

Come out to learn more about the TCC, how to apply to its clerkship program, and what the program has to offer.

If you have any questions, please email uofttaxlawsociety@gmail.com.

On Tuesday, November 15th, from 12:30-2PM, the Environmental Law Club will be hosting Mark Mattson for a talk on water law literacy.

Mark Mattson is a prominent environmental lawyer and the founder and President of Lake Ontario Waterkeeper. He has worked in the private, public, and nonprofit sectors over the course of his career. As a prosecutor, Mark was part of ground-breaking private prosecutions and administrative cases against major industrial polluters. 

Mark's lecture will focus on helping students answer the question he is asked most often: What can I do to ensure Canadian waters are swimmable, drinkable, and fishable?

Please join us in room J219. Vegetarian food will be served.

Time: Friday, November 4, at 7:00 pm

Location: Elephant & Castle, 378 Yonge Street, Toronto, ON M5B 1S6

The U of T Asia Law Society (ALS) and Asian Law Students Association of Osgoode (ALSA) will be having our first joint social of the year! Come out to Elephant & Castle on Friday, Nov 4th for some food and drinks, and to meet with fellow club members.

We hope to see all of you there!

For any updates, please visit: https://www.facebook.com/events/1800070570261175/

The Law Society will be holding a live webcast open to all law students, candidates and law schools on Wednesday, November 16^th, 2016 from 10:00 am to 12:00 pm. The session will cover key components of the Licensing Process and will include a question and answer period. The session will be available on demand for those who are not able to participate in the live broadcast.

Viewers are asked to pre-register for this webcast. Once registered, you may access the webcast promptly at 10 am on November 16, 2016.

Register now:

http://lsuc.on.ca/lawyerlicensing

Information regarding the application process, the Licensing Examinations, study tips, rules, policies and dates to remember is posted on the Law Society's website. You are strongly encouraged to review the information to ensure you are aware of all the requirements before applying online. This webcast will touch upon these and other aspects of the Licensing Process however more fulsome information is available at http://lsuc.on.ca/licensingprocesslawyer/.

If you require further information, please contact Licensing and Accreditation at the Law Society by email to:                                                                   

licensingprocess@lsuc.on.ca                         

Ethics at Noon with Vida Panitch

Liberalism, Commodification, and Justice

Vida Panitch

Department of Philosophy

Carleton University

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

Room 200, Larkin Building
15 Devonshire Place

Vida Panitch is professor in the Department of Philosophy, Carleton University, Ottawa. She is a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Ethics this year. Her research focuses on debates in distributive justice, bioethics, and feminist philosophy.

Abstract:

A number of political philosophers have argued recently against what they see as an ever-increasing trend toward commodification, or what Michael Sandel has described as the transition of a market economy into a market society. Their critique of commodification is accompanied by a condemnation of liberal political philosophy, which supposedly condones any kind of practice, commercial or otherwise, that involves willing and competent participants. The liberal’s endorsement of the market as a distributive mechanism, which pays heed to the costs individual choices impose on others but not to the content of those choices themselves, means she cannot justify curtailing a market transaction on the basis of what is sold, only on the basis of how it is sold. Unless she can demonstrate some procedural defect such as coercion, fraud, or impaired bargaining, according to the commodification critique, she is left without resources to condemn markets in everything from votes and citizenship, to health care and education, to intimate services and body parts.

The commodification theorist is correct that if this were all the liberal had to say in the face of noxious markets, it would be inadequate: there are some goods that simply should not go to the highest bidder. Yet we have much reason to be put off by the strategies commodification theorists have themselves offered for restricting noxious markets in a liberal democracy, appealing as they do to the socially dominant and morally conservative values attached to various goods and practices.  My aim in this paper is thus twofold. First, to expose the flaws in the two leading strands of commodification theory, and second, to argue that the political liberal does indeed have the wherewithal to account for the noxiousness of various kinds of markets not just on the basis of how something is sold, but on the basis of what is being sold. A theory of justice that includes a principle of equal basic rights and another that guarantees sufficiency in basic needs and the social basis of self-respect provides the foundation the political liberal requires to identify certain markets as noxious, I will show, and thus an explanation for why, even in a market society, certain things should not be for sale.

The CBA has decided to offer its Solutions Series to law students who are CBA members for free! This will be available to all students across the country. 

For more information about this series of workshops and to register, please go to http://www.cbapd.org/details_en.aspx?id=na_on2sol16