Lawyers Doing Cool Things - Morgan Sim, JD 2011

Morgan Sim is hosting a Lawyers Doing Cool Things session on Tuesday October 13 at 12:40 - 1:50.

Morgan’s practice includes civil litigation and administrative law, with an emphasis on matters that arise in the workplace. She has particularly broad experience providing advice and representation on matters involving employment contracts, severance packages, wrongful dismissals, professional licensing and discipline, disability benefits, human rights issues, and workplace sexual harassment and assault. 

To register, click here

All student leaders at the Faculty of Law are invited to attend a workshop co-faciliated by SLS President Robert Nanni, VP Social Delana Zamparo, and Student Life and Inclusivity Program Manager Sara-Marni Hubbard. 

The workshop will cover the following topics:

• Clubs finances: including fundraising; how to apply for funding from the SLS and the faculty; how to apply for funding from the central university; club bank accounts; budgeting; etc.
• Hosting in person events during COVID: including following public health guidelines; booking space; campus movers; catering; alcohol; AV; etc. 
• Hosting virtual events: including professional Zoom accounts for student groups; best practices; etc. 
• Marketing
• Trademark and licensing
• Webpages
• And more! 

To register, click here. 

Contact Sara-Marni for more info: sara.hubbard@utoronto.ca 

Mindfulness is the act of paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, without judgement.

This weekly online drop-in sitting practice welcomes all students, faculty and staff to join whenever you are able. 

Mondays from 12:45 - 1:15 pm

https://zoom.us/j/96572632638?pwd=MXpyaE5TZkZjbG1MY002VFJTODVlZz09

Passcode: 369466

The initial format of the half hour will be a brief introduction to mindfulness and the weekly practice, a 15 minute mindfulness practice and a short discussion of the practice. 

For more information please contact Terry Gardiner at terry.gardiner@utoronto.ca

The Polar Law Group is a new student-led initiative dedicated to creating a forum for studying legal issues relating to the Arctic and Antarctic regions at the University of Toronto. The group participates in an international discussion group on Arctic issues and organizes socials, and events (online and/or in-person) on contemporary legal issues relating to the Arctic and Antarctic region. Given the complexity of the region, understanding the Arctic and Antarctic region requires an interdisciplinary perspective. Students across the Faculty of Law and the University of Toronto, with experience and interest in topics pertaining to the region, ranging from Indigenous rights, international law, energy development, maritime law, trade and investment, cultural heritage, scientific co-operation, biodiversity, and more, are encouraged to participate. 

We are looking for executive members, especially 1L students, to lead this new initiative. Executive members will assist in organizing online events, and if conditions permit, in-person events and socials. If you are interested, please send Emily (4L, JD/MGA) an email at emily.tsui@mail.utoronto.ca indicating your interest as an executive member, or a Facebook message. The deadline to become an executive member for the 2020-21 year is on Wednesday, September 23, 2020. The estimated committment is 5-10 hours per semester. 

We have an active Facebook group for all members: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1515762705292698

The Graduate Law Students’ Association welcomes all fellow graduate students to the 2020-2021 academic year at the Faculty of Law, and invites GPLLM, LLM and SJD to Meet-and-Greet on Wednesday, September 16^th at 6pm.

Join the meeting to learn about GLSA’s activities, meet the current Executives and understand how you can join GLSA in the upcoming elections!

• Zoom Meeting

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89918861673?pwd=MVUxNmRrVmZUbjM1TjdFNkRMZmRSdz09

Meeting ID: 899 1886 1673

Passcode: 225729

Subscribe to GLSA’s newsletter https://glsauoft.wordpress.com/

Join Class of 2020/2021 Group https://www.facebook.com/groups/2744994089106043

meet-and-greet_glsa.docx

Work-Study Positions with the Asper Centre

Research and Communications Assistant: The Asper Centre is looking for a student to provide research, writing and technical support for the Centre’s website and social media (Facebook and Twitter). The position involves some research and drafting for content to be uploaded to the Centre's website related to Canadian constitutional law and the activities of the Centre (primarily case summaries). Support for Asper Centre events will also be expected. Training will be provided in respect to the website; therefore, in-depth knowledge of website development, maintenance and design, although helpful, is not required.  Apply by September 18th at 5:00 p.m. through the University’s Career Centre page: http://clnx.utoronto.ca (Job No. 166388).

 Administrative Assistant: The Administrative Assistant will be responsible for financial tracking of expenses for the David Asper Centre for Constitutional Rights and the organization of electronic documents, including spreadsheets. Tasks will include the creation of templates for the legal and administrative work of the Centre, electronic file maintenance and the tracking of the Centre's budget, including sorting and processing financial documents such as invoices, expense claims, and debit memos. Basic financial literacy in respect of budgeting and accounting is required. Some knowledge of the legal context would be desirable. Preferred programs of study are business/commerce and law. Apply by September 18^th at 5:00 p.m. through the University’s Career Centre page: http://clnx.utoronto.ca (Job No. 166408).

The new Investor Protection Clinic at U of T gives law students unique opportunities to learn 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 to promote investor protection. ​

headnotes_-_ipc.pdf

This legal research & writing training session is hosted by our National Research Partner Thomson Reuters, and is mandatory for all first-year PBSC U of T student volunteers. 

At this session, students will learn how to conduct legal research using WestlawNext Canada. 

Zoom credentials will be circulated closer to the date.

The Indigenous Human Rights Program is a pilot project in collaboration with the Ontario Federation of Indigenous Friendship Centres (OFIFC) that is launching two human rights legal clinics for self-identifying Indigenous people in Toronto and Ottawa, a public legal education program on Indigenous human rights, and a human rights and Indigenous Cultural Competency training program for PBSC law students and volunteer lawyers.

PBSC is seeking 4-6 law students total from Osgoode Hall and the University of Toronto Faculty of Law to work together to bring the Toronto program to life. U of T law students must be in upper-years to participate. 

The application process is as follows:

FIRST, submit your CV and a Statement of Interest to your PBSC Chapter at: probonostudents.utoronto@gmail.com

The Statement of Interest should be max one page single-spaced. In it:

a. Tell us why you wish to volunteer for this program;

b. Outline your interest or experience in human rights, access to justice, and/or Indigenous legal issues (we value and welcome all forms of experience, including lived, professional, volunteer, academic, etc.);

c. Explain what PBSC's values of dignity, equity and humility mean to you, and what they should mean to the Indigenous Human Rights Program.

SECOND, some students will be selected for a virtual "Tea & Talk" with PBSC and the OFIFC. This is a 15-20 minute interview. These will be held September 14-16. Class comes first, so we'll work around your course schedule!

If you are selected for an interview, you will be notified on September 11 or 12. Volunteers will be confirmed on September 17, 2020.

If you aren't selected to volunteer for the Indigenous Human Rights Program, you can still apply to other public interest placements with PBSC!

volunteers_-_indigenous_human_rights_program_-_uoft.pdf

The International Human Rights Program will be holding a professional and ethics training for law students who are participating in IHRP volunteer opportunities on Friday, October 2 at 12:45 pm.

Please join us via Zoom:

Link:

https://zoom.us/j/98586444816?pwd=d0taS3o0RmZyWkp0YW5NbHQxZ0Jjdz09

Punitive Welfare on the Margins of the State: Narratives of Punishment and (In)Justice in Masiphumelele

While there is an established literature on the relationship between political economy and state punishment, there is less work on how punishment is constituted from below in contexts of inequality. In this talk I analyse the discourse around incidents of lethal collective violence that occurred in 2015 in a former ‘black township’ in South Africa. I use this discourse as a lens for examining how punitive forms of popular justice interact with state punishment. Whether via the slow violence of racialized structural inequality or the viscerally corporeal high rates of interpersonal violence, my interviewees were intimately acquainted with violence. Although they supported long-term imprisonment, and the expulsion of ‘criminals’ from their communities, none of them came across as conservative right-wing populists. Instead, they adopted complex positions, calling for a type of punitive welfarism, which combined harsh solutions to crime with explicit recognition of the importance of dealing with ‘root causes’. I argue that when the state is perceived to be failing to both impose punishment and provide welfare, violence becomes a technology of exchange, which simultaneously seeks both more punishment and more welfare. The result is an assemblage of exclusionary penal forms, many of which stem from and/or overlap with the violence (penal and otherwise), that was deployed by colonial and apartheid rulers as a means to control their racialized subjects.

This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Wednesday, September 16. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Gail Super
Sociology
University of Toronto

Data, Transparency, and AI Ethics

The interdisciplinary field of AI ethics has started new debates into the fairness of particular algorithms and the role of algorithms in automated decision making systems. In the first part of this talk, I introduce the reporting and transparency work that Google’s Ethical AI team has been pursuing around the models and data involved in these systems. A major assumption of this work is the stability of particular ontologies of socially salient characteristics. In the second part of this talk, I turn to critical race theory and sociological work on race and ethnicity to ground conceptualizations of race for algorithmic fairness and machine learning more broadly. Lastly, I outline a research program around the genealogy of data used in machine learning research. While machine learning has seen a rapid proliferation of new methods, the datasets which undergird these methods have received comparatively little attention. A research program around the genealogy of these datasets should be attentive to the constellation of organizations and stakeholders involved in their creation, the intent, values, and assumptions of their authors and curators, and the adoption of datasets by subsequent researchers.

This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Tuesday, September 22. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

To Surveil and Predict: A Human Rights Analysis of Algorithmic Policing in Canada

A collaboration between the International Human Rights Program and the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, To Surveil and Predict: A Human Rights Analysis of Algorithmic Policing in Canada examines algorithmic technologies that are designed for use in criminal law enforcement systems in Canada. Algorithmic policing is an area of technological development that, in theory, is designed to enable law enforcement agencies to either automate surveillance or to draw inferences through the use of mass data processing in the hopes of predicting potential criminal activity. The report finds that the use of algorithmic policing technologies by law enforcement can raise many potential constitutional and civil liberties violations under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and international human rights law. In their presentation, the authors of this report discuss their findings, including what steps governments and the public in Canada should consider taking in light of human rights dangers at stake.

► please register here

This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on Friday, October 2. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream. (For other events in the series, and to subscribe, visit YouTube.com/c/CentreforEthics.)

Kate Robertson
Markson Law
Citizen Lab Research Fellow

Cynthia Khoo
Tekhnos Law
Citizen Lab Research Fellow

Yolanda Song
Stevenson Whelton LLP
IHRP Research Associate