I would like to draw my readers’ attention to another blog entitled LawIsCool. Thanks to Omar Ha-Redeye, founder of LawIsCool, I am now an account holder and blogger there. LawIsCool looks at the substantive issues in Canadian and International law today and has a wide readership (it gets over 4,0o0 unique hits every day). The writers are predominantly law students.

To make it clear, this blog will continue and will deal with issues of law school (what I’m learning, stresses of exams, etc.) in hopes that it will be helpful to future law students. All the substantive stuff, the information and my opinions about trends in Canadian and International law, will be posted at LawIsCool.

The amount of spam on this blog over the last couple of days has driven me crazy. To deal with it, I’ve installed an advanced spam filter and a captcha system. If you’re leaving me comments and you are not a registered user, don’t forget the enter the letters in picture in the box at the bottom of the page before submitting your comments. If your comments are not showing up it means they are being flagged as spam. To prevent this, please don’t put more than two links in your comments. If you are routinely being called a spammer, use my email to let me know.

I went to visit the University of Western Ontario in London (Ontario) on Wednesday. First of all, I want to take the opportunity to thank the students and professors that I met at the law school. Everyone was very nice and helpful. The campus looked and felt amazing, at least in comparison with UTSC. I also sat in on an Information Law class which sounded very interesting. The city itself is abuzz with stuff to do, at least in the evening and it seems small enough to make getting around without a car very possible. Again, a big thanks to everyone who had anything to do with my day in London.

I have to pay a similar visit to Ottawa sometime soon and look around the campus and the city.

I got accepted to the University of Ottawa this afternoon. I am very excited, although not as much as with the first acceptance (that one sent me into the ceiling just because it was the first). I will have to visit UOttawa as well as Western (and wherever else I get in) and make an informed decision about where to study this fall.

Since being accepted to UWO, I started looking at law school rankings. The most popular one seems to be the Maclean’s annual law school rankings. They don’t seem to make a lot of sense to me and it seems like the ratings are very skewed. For example, how can a school that is ranked #2 (out of 16) for hiring of its graduates by prominent firms be ranked #12 overall? It seems to me like there is too much emphasis placed on the academic aspect of law school by the Maclean’s (and others’) rating systems. Maclean’s puts 50% of the weight of the ranking on the number of publication by the faculty. If one school has more faculty are lawyers (as opposed to legal scholars) than another one, the rankings stop making sense. Is it better to be taught by a legal scholar than a lawyer? I guess I don’t know, I’ll let you know after law school.

If anyone has any comments on the rankings, I would love to hear them. Having said that, being that this is Ontario (not the U.S.), we know that the differences between quality of education and worth of the degree is equal if not identical. And don’t get me started on the LL.B. vs J.D. debate.

I got into the University of Western Ontario Law School this afternoon. As expected, I nearly hit the ceiling after I saw the green checkmark on the UWO intranet. I hope I will get a couple more acceptances before April and decide where to go then.

The journey continues…

I’m still waiting to hear back from law schools. I’m keeping track of who is getting accepted where (and with what marks/LSAT scores) through a great website called http://www.lawstudents.ca. Basically, when someone’s been accepted, they announce it and post their undergrad average, LSAT score, and any special considerations they think got them in. It’s not time for 3.62/160 yet, but hopefully will be soon.

It’s been a crazy couple of weeks with assignments and midterms. I did four assignments and have one more to do as well as a midterm tonight. Yesterday was my birthday and I hardly noticed due to the volume of work. Next week is reading week, and had if I hadn’t been getting four wisdom teeth pulled, I might actually have had a chance at enjoying it.

The attention for the bLAWgosphere continues, I’ve been published in an article on a popular blawg. Check it out.

Take care for now.