On October 21, 2023, CALE/ACEJ held its annual meeting of members at the Faculty of Law, University of Victoria. In his report, President Stephen Pitel outlined CALE/ACEJ’s activities over the past year, including: the transition of the Chief Information Officer role from Amy Salyzyn to Basil Alexander; transitioning the listserv from UOttawa to Google Groups; implementing a Travel Grant Program to support graduate students and post-doctoral fellows attending the conference; partnering with the CBA and FLSC for the 2023 Ethics Forum; submissions to the FLSC’s National Requirement Review Committee re: ethics and professionalism and to the FLSC’s Model Code Committee re: former judges returning to practice; and other director submissions and activities that build awareness of CALE/ACEJ.
Continue readingMonthly Archives: October 2023
Brent Cotter receives CALE/ACEJ Lifetime Achievement Award
On October 20, 2023, during the annual conference at the University of Victoria, CALE/ACEJ presented its Lifetime Achievement Award to Senator Brent Cotter. The award is for having demonstrated “sustained accomplishments in the field of legal ethics and professionalism”.
Brent is one of the best-known and best-regarded scholars of legal ethics in Canada. Throughout his career as a law professor, Brent has taught and published in the area of legal ethics. Indeed, he is one of very few professors who specialized in legal ethics prior to 2000. He played a fundamental role in increasing the profile of the field in Canadian law schools and legal education and in assisting newer colleagues in developing their own expertise in the field.
Continue readingCall for Papers: ILEC 2024
The next International Legal Ethics Conference will be held July 17-19, 2024 at the University of Amsterdam (details available here). This major legal ethics conference is held every two years. Recent previous conferences include UCLA (2022), Melbourne (2018), Fordham (2016) and City University London (2014).
The organizers have issued a call for proposals (available here), which includes both papers and other kinds of presentation such as workshops. Proposals are due by February 7, 2024. The theme is “Legal Professionals in a Digitalising World”.
It would be great to see a strong Canadian contingent in the Netherlands next summer.
Conference Recap 2023
The annual conference was held on October 19-21, 2023, at the University of Victoria. Pooja Parmar, the Vice-President of CALE/ACEJ, was the conference coordinator. She was assisted by Alan Treleaven, Robert Tapper, Laura Hamilton and Tayana Simpson. They did a terrific job and made all attendees very welcome.
Continue readingSecond Submission to the National Requirement Review Committee
In June 2023 the National Requirement Review Committee of the FLSC invited feedback on options and preliminary proposals for amendments to the National Requirement described in a Discussion Paper available on the FLSC website. The National Requirement specifies the competencies and skills graduates of Canadian law school programs and internationally trained graduates and lawyers must have acquired to be admitted to law society admission programs in the Canadian common law jurisdictions.
CALE/ACEJ had previously provided submissions (available here) at an earlier stage of the Review Committee’s work. It has now provided a response, available below, to the proposals in the Discussion Paper, focusing specifically on issues of legal ethics and professionalism.
Canadian Association for Legal Ethics / Association canadienne pour l’éthique juridique 