According to the article, if you were to ask (almost) any practitioner what the purpose of law school is, you will hear words such as “practical”, “business”, “project management”, etc in the answer; but ask (almost) any professor, and you will hear words like “nature of justice”, “jurisprudence”, “legal thinking”, etc. It’s not that one way is better than another, it’s that the answer are different that is concerning.

As a law student, I don’t think that I can fairly comment on this debate. I can only say this: law schools are getting increasingly better at offering programs which expose students to the practical side of the legal profession. For example, working at the Business Law Clinic, I had experience with real clients doing real work in an office environment. Yes, the experience was somewhat simulated due to all the checks and balances and restrictions on what I could and could not do, but such is the reality of any training.

The point is the opportunities to pick up some practical skills are there, and it is up to the students to find them. For anyone who is considering law school, remember this: classes will teach you to think like a lawyer, but they won’t teach you to be one. The only way you can learn how to be a lawyer is through the practical programs offered by clinics (offered by the university) and internships (offered by the profession). This means some of the onus is on the profession as well: internships should be provided and accessible if the next generation of lawyers is to be as good (or better!) than the previous.

There is one important thing any prospective Canadian law student must realize: most blogs that publish these articles have domains names that end in .com. Look at my domain name: see a difference? These articles bring up excellent points about problems in the American system of legal education, but don’t forget that the system is exactly that: American. To be even clearer: this is NOT a law school problem, this is a U.S. law school problem.

Nobody argues that law school is not expensive, but Canadian law graduates do not typically have a six figure debt load after graduation. My law school tuition $45,000 for all three years ($15,000 per year, give or take). Compare that to a law school in the U.S., where $45,000 per year sounds like a bargain, and you start to get a different picture of the debt load that is carried by young lawyers. I would probably not be doing law school if I had to pay U.S. tuition rates because it’s just not worth it. However, the U.S. schools are much more forthcoming with financial aid and it would be interesting to look at what students are actually paying out of pocket. Many schools increase tuition fees to get a boost in the rankings, but then offer financial aid to offset the increases.

Here is Canada, there are no law school tiers or hierarchies, as much as Mclean’s Magazine would love for you to believe that there are. Most law school graduates still gets jobs in the legal profession. The hire rate is not 100%, but it’s not 54% either like some of these blogs would have you believe. The hire rates for large corporate law firms are available (you have to leaf through the paper to find the charts) and the hireback rates at those firms stand close to 80%. Of course not everyone is in a large corporate law firm, but this should give you an idea of the state of the legal market in Canada. It’s a little more difficult to track people who are not going into the large firms, but before the recession, according to the Law Society of Upper Canada, 56 out of 1,318 students could not secure work in the legal profession (hint: that’s 4.2%). The recession changed this somewhat, but I can make two observations: from anecdotal evidence (there isn’t much else publicly available yet), the rate did not all of sudden jump from 4% to 54%; and the U.S. had many more unemployed or underemployed lawyers than Canada even when the economy was doing incredibly well.

All this is not to say that the Canadian legal market and law school market don’t have problems. However, if someone is deciding whether or not to go to law school, it would help if that person makes a decision based on real information, not irrelevant stuff that comes up in a google search. Take the time to look at Canadian sources, but more importantly, talk to the people who are in the system, whether law school or practice. Don’t make a decision based on U.S.-centric advice of some website.

Toronto

In the past 24 hours, my hometown of Toronto saw the most destruction in a long time. You can check out the photos, but it ain’t pretty. It started as a normal G20 protest and some 500 people later broke off and started breaking windows, setting fires and attacking the police. I’m not sure what they were protesting (I don’t think they know what they were protesting), but one quote resonated with me: “Corporations have more rights than we do, and that’s disgusting”.

That quote is one of the fundamental misunderstandings about our modern financial and legal system that can be rectified with education. Corporations don’t have more rights than “we” do, corporations have the same rights as we do. This is because in the eyes of the law, corporations are no different from people. They have jobs, they pay taxes, they can commit crimes and be subject to judicial proceedings, they become bankrupt, they have the right to freedom of expression and association, etc. There are some statutory differences between human persons and corporate persons, but those differences are not all that relevant.*

*But those differences are sometimes humourous. For example, corporations cannot married and divorced. At least one individual thinks they should be able to.

Corporations were given the power to be “persons” in order to separate the activities of the companies from the activities of the people that run those companies. Look above where I said that corporations can commit crimes: I mean that literally. It’s not the same as saying that the CEO of a corporation can commit a crime. It means that the juristic entity that is the corporation can commit a crime. It’s punishment can be anything from a monetary fine to the death penalty. Death penalty means a court order that the corporation be wound up and no longer carry on business. A corporation’s liberties may also be limited, for example, a corporation may be forbidden from certain activities (i.e. permits may be denied, certain business units may be ordered sold, etc.). Almost anything that can be done to a human person can be done to a corporation. They are living, breathing entities, the difference being that instead of food, water and air, they require investors, managers and workers. Cut off one of those, and it’s the functional equivalent of cutting off food or water or air to the human body.

There is another important point here that I won’t give too much attention to, but will mention: the people that profit when a corporation succeeds is everyone. If you expect to collect from the Canada Pension Plan or if you have stocks or mutual funds or even if you have a savings account, how much money you make depends on how a corporation does. By protesting against corporations you are literally biting the hand that pays you when you retire.

I can go into the history of how corporations and pension funds came about, but I won’t. The point is that this is something that needs to be taught in schools at the high school level. Given how our society operates, knowing this is every bit important as knowing how our political system operates. Once you are informed, the quote “corporation have more rights than we do” stops making sense. The protesters who say things like that are forced to rethink what they are actually protesting.

Don’t get me wrong: there is nothing wrong with saying that corporations should not be seen as persons. But in order to say that, one would have to know the legal context of our society.

Paris

There is currently a protest going on in France regarding a proposal to raise the retirement age to 62 from 60. Unlike Toronto, the protesters seem to know what they’re protesting. However, that does not mean that their premise is not fallacious. I especially like this quote: “the government should tax high wage-earners and banks instead to ensure there is enough money for pensions”. Toward the end of the article, there is also a suggestion that a higher life expectancy should not lead to more years at work. Let’s address those in turn.

Taxes

There is some appeal in taxing the rich (be they humans or corporations) to fund social programs, including pensions. That is, in fact, what the modern welfare state is built on and there is nothing inherently wrong with that. There is however a misconception that results from a lack of knowledge of economics: it assumes that those being taxed will just eat the loss. This is simply not true. If you increase the tax on banks, guess what the banks are going to do? Hello higher fees and lower interest paid on savings. If you try to legislate that, your country simply won’t have banks because nobody will be willing to take a lower profit. Then where will your pension come from? The fact that people don’t know (or think they can ignore) this reality points to a massive failure in education.

Life Expectancy

The protesters in the article are protesting the fact that a higher life expectancy will lead to a decreased standard of living because people will be forced to work longer. That is exactly true and protesting that is like protesting against the sun setting in the evening. Take a very simple example: assume there is no government and you are the only person on an uninhabited island. You expect to live until 85, you work from 25 to 65, setting aside food and whatever else you need to last you the 20 years that you plan not to work (between 65 and 85). Now, let’s say instead of living until 85, you live until 90. At the end of your 85th year, you have a choice: you can drastically reduce your standard of living or you can go back to work to collect more food and other necessaries of life. You can protest that all you want but your protest will not make your conundrum go away.

The same is true in a complex modern society: you put away money toward retirement and when that money runs out, you’re finished. If you ask the government to take care of you past that, what you’re doing is asking the younger generation (the one that’s still working and paying taxes) to take care of you. This means they have less to spend on themselves, which means that social conditions are deteriorating.

Ff you try to increase taxes on businesses to maintain the standard of living, look above for what will happen. The standard of living will only get worse because you will either get inflation or businesses will leave (resulting in unemployment). The only way to avoid that is to have continuous population growth (the more people are working, the less the drain on the social system to take care of those who are not working). Continuous population growth however has its own problems, the most obvious being environmental degradation.

Solution

Knowledge is always the solution to ignorance. As a result, we should start mandatory teaching programs in introductory law, economics and politics at the high school level. Given modern society, those courses are probably more important than geography and arts and definitely more important than gym which everyone is forced to take in grade 9. Having those courses as electives is not good enough because given the choice, many high school students will take gym over economics and drama over politics. If social ignorance is to be uprooted, everyone must be educated, not just those that feel like it.

Bell, Telus and Rogers have a relatively simple business model: sell handsets at a substantial discount and lock customers into a three year contract. That’s done through a legal agreement and a software lock on the phone that will prevent that device from being used on a competitor’s wireless network. That substantial discount translates into hottest phones like the iPhone 3GS being sold for $99, at least $300 off its regular (ebay/craigslist) price. Bell/Telus/Rogers in turn make back their investment by knowing that you will be their customer and hence be paying them monthly fees. In other words, the full cost of the cool new phone is amortized by (a.k.a. buried in) your monthly costs. This prevents sticker shock and makes the newest phones accessible to people who may not otherwise be able to afford them.

Enter the new players like Wind and Mobilicity. These guys sound great: $25-$35 unlimited everything plans with no contracts. That is until you realize a couple of very important things:

• You pay the full cost of your phone. For example, a Blackberry Bold 9700 costs $450.
• You will have a lot of trouble buying phones online because these guys use non-standard frequencies
• Finally, your place is only “unlimited” as long as you stay in the area of coverage for your carrier. The minute you leave the area, you are roaming and you will pay through the nose for it. The coverage exists only in big cities. I live in London, Ontario and I am out of luck.

Considering the prices of the best phones, if they are even available on those networks, the Bell/Telus/Rogers 3 year contract starts to look pretty decent. Unfortunately, consumers cannot have it both ways and must pick between the discounted phone option that comes with a contract or expensive phone that comes with no contract. Incidentally, for about the price of an iPhone 3GS from Rogers you can get a candybar phone from some company called Huawei. That phone looks like it came from six years ago. If you just want to talk, text and don’t mind being tied to a big city, this is perfect. For many people, myself included, this is not a good solution.

And so Bell it is.

The other major problem faced by the new entrants into the wireless market is the cost of building a coast to coast network. Until they are able to do that, forcing their customers to pay roaming fees will be a huge setback to them. The issue is Bell, Telus and Rogers were able to build their cross-country networks because they were all at some point publicly subsidized. They are also very well established and are probably not going anywhere absent some very substantial changes in the regulations that govern them. Thus, they have access to a lot of capital that new entrants are not able to secure.

The new guys will have to somehow overcome that problem.

In terms of results, without giving up too much detail, I am happy (and relieved) to say that I finished quite well and am proud of my achievements in first year law. This summer I am working at the Western Business Law Clinic, so if someone is starting up a business in Ontario and needs bargain-basement priced legal advice, send an email my way.  You can check out what we do on our website.

I wanted to share some of my thoughts on 1L before I write the finals. Exams have a way of changing a person’s outlook, and I think what I have to say needs to be put out there before I forget it.

Law

I learned a lot this year. I mean A LOT. I don’t think I have ever learned this much before in such a short time. To get a grasp of how much you learn in 1L, take six 500 page textbooks and read them cover to cover. That’s essentially how much you learn in 1L. I think I may have read that much in my four years of undergrad…maybe.

Also, law is incredibly interesting. People who never studied it are simply not able to appreciate the complexity and intrigue that is the modern day common law system. The downside is that you have to love it. If you don’t, it kills you (see below under “stress”).

People

This may be a UWO thing, but the people are very decent and helpful. Forget the stuff you read on pre-law forums. Nobody rips pages out of library books. Nobody sabotages computers or printers. People won’t delete your notes if you leave your laptop on your desk. Nor will they steal your laptop.

On the contrary, I haven’t met a single person whom I don’t like or don’t respect for one reason or another. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses and working together ensures that strengths are maintained and weaknesses are overcome.

Stress

For me personally, stress hit in the middle of March. Before that, I was wondering why everyone who went through 1L was talking about how horrible the stress is. It’s pretty bad, but if it lasts a short time, it may even be a good thing. I just feel sorry for people who started feeling it back in October. That must have sucked.

1L Jobs

Don’t count on it unless you have connections or are totally amazing in your first semester of law school (i.e. you have to do better than 4 A’s and 2B’s. Oh, and you need a personality and work experience. Have fun.). Even then, your connections will probably only get you into a small firm because large firms have systems to prevent nepotism.

Volunteering

It’s good to get involved in some law-related volunteer activities. Not only does it do wonders for your resume, it also gives you a chance to apply all that stuff that you’re learning and see how it works in the real world.

What I’ll miss most

Definitely my small group. We had some great times. I’ll also miss absorbing that much information. Believe it or not, I actually enjoyed it.

What I’ll miss least

Having to write six exams in two weeks. I hope I never have to go through that again, six is way too many.

Would I do it all over again?

Absolutely!

Next Plans

After my last exam, go to a huge party and then go to Toronto and hibernate for a week. Then, spend the summer working at the Business Law Clinic and get ready for the job search process that starts in the first week of 2L.

Congratulations to the runner up team as well as the honourable mentions. You were all great competitors and I hope to face off with you again in a future moot.

To take an extreme example, say someone has been accused of murder. Arguing about the law means that you’re arguing over whether or not there is a law against murder. Arguing that about the application of the law means you’re arguing that what the accused did is not murder. Big difference because by arguing the latter, you are implicitly acknowledging the existence of the law against murder.

Of course nobody would seriously argue that there’s no law against murder. One only has to look at section 235 of the Criminal Code of Canada to confirm the law’s existence and see it spelled out in black and white. This is not as easy in other cases, particularly when it comes to the common law.

The case I ran into a few days ago concerned compensation for nervous shock induced by negligence (Mustapha v. Culligan, the “fly in a waterbottle” case). The courts struggled with whether or not there was even any law in Ontario that would entitle Mr. Mustapha to recover for his psychiatric illness. To add to the confusion, the Ontario Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court of Canada came to completely different conclusions on this very question. The arguments did not center on whether the laws regarding to nervous shock applied to this case, the arguments centered on whether or not those law existed. Once again, big difference.

One of my professors says that everything is arguable. If this is true, how are individuals supposed to structure their affairs so as to not run afoul of the law that may or may not exist? If everything is indeed arguable, it’s great for lawyers (cha-ching!) and judges who have a very wide role in setting social policy. I’m not so sure that it’s so great for everyone else. On the other hand, it’s this uncertainty that gives the law flexibility to evolve through judicial decisions. So the choice is between uncertainty and rigidity. Pick your poison, I guess…

Openness

In order for any device to be useful, it needs some kind of software. This is true of everything electronic,  from calculators, to TV’s, to telephones and to most obviously, computers. In the past few years, there has been an explosion in computer-like devices, that is hardware that has an operating system and which can run software other than what is preloaded.

To use an easy example, take a cell phone. Originally, all the cell phone is programmed to do is make phone calls. Then, someone said “why don’t we put games on it?”. Then, “why not a camera?”. Followed by “why don’t we connect it to the internet?”. Lo and behold, we have smartphones. We can now extend the capabilities of our phones and similar devices in ways that were not imagined by their original designers.

Original multi-purpose phones were relatively open. This was done mostly as a convenience to developers: they did not want to reinvent the wheel by writing a new operating system, so they used one that was time-tested: java. This meant that anything that was created using java mobile edition (J2ME) could probably run on a java-enabled cell phone.

Even the original smartphones were open (“smartphone” is a difficult concept. I’ll refer to anything that connects to the internet and allows user-installed programs as a “smartphone”). Windows Mobile (used to be called Windows CE) allowed developers basically unlimited flexibility in creating and distributing software for Windows Mobile devices. Installing software did not require any reverse-engineering, hacking or any type of security bypasses.

I use the term “openness” to refer to precisely this flexibility. Openness does not mean open source, does not mean free software, does not guarantee any freedoms to users. However, developers have a lot of freedom that they can choose to pass on to their users (or not). They can distribute their creations in any form, on any website, charge fees or not, etc.

Current State

Since the introduction of the iphone, there has been a trend in the opposite direction. To use the example of the iphone itself, the only (legal) way for software developers to distribute their wares is through a process that is controlled by Apple from end to end. Apple controls what applications can be distributed, it tracks each user that installs the application, and of course, takes a nice commission from the sale of each app. There are obvious problems with such end-to-end control, including this one.

The problem is that this is not limited to the iphone. Blackberry is doing something similar with App World, although I believe it’s still possible to install apps without appworld. Even the Android platform is jumping on the bandwagon with Android Market.

The only holdout thus far is Windows Mobile probably because the users of those phones are way too used to not having any restrictions on them. We will see what happens once Windows Mobile 7 comes out later this year. I would not be surprised if it has new limitations on the type of software that can be installed.

Of course this is not a problem that is limited to phones. For example, the PSP, a device that is theoretically capable of many computer-like features has been completely locked down and can only play games (that you have to buy and where Sony can take a cut). The Wii has bluetooth functionality that can only work with its own wiimote. Why not other bluetooth devices? This is not even considering upcoming hardware such as the Apple iPad that will mimic the iphone in every way in terms of dealing with third party software.

This is a shame

The main reason I don’t like this is that a lot of potential remains under lock and key. If you look at what the latest iPod Touch is, it’s a computer with 800MhZ, 256MB of RAM, and a 32 (or 64) GB hard disk. I had a computer with similar specs in 2002. My computer in 2002 could do a lot more than my iPod today, even though they are technologically similar. The reason has nothing to do with technology, but has everything to do with poor decisions that keep such devices locked down.

Solutions

Unfortunately, the current solutions to this problem are quasi-legal at best (downright illegal at worst). It involves a healthy dose of hacking and looking for exploits. This in turn can lead to serious breaches of security when the same hack that can be used to install an unauthorized program is used to distribute a virus (again, an iphone example).

The easiest way to prevent this is to avoid having as many people looking for these kinds of hacks. The overwhelming majority of hackers are not malicious people and would not be hacking if their phones were open to third party software. And even if they were hacking, there would not be a need for a wide dissemination of these hacks. This means that the efforts of people who mean well would not end up in the hands of the malicious.

The Business Case

I am well aware of the fact that companies that release locked down devices see a business opportunity in controlling the software that can be loaded onto them. Indeed taking a cut of every program sold online is a good revenue model. However, opening up these devices will inevitably increase their sales. This is pure common sense: the more a device can do, the more people it attracts.

By the way, I am not saying that hardware manufacturers have to stop selling software. Indeed it may continue to make a lot of sense to sell through a centralized place where users know and trust the source of the program. Opening up the device up to users “at their own risk” though needs to be done. Users need to have control over their devices.

Conclusion

The PC industry has realized a long time ago that openness is the way to go. It allows devices to what was never intended or imagined by the original designers of computers. Who would have through 40 years ago that computers would be used for live DJing or advanced image creation (Traktor and Photoshop, respectively)? The engineers that created modern computers 40 years ago were looking for advanced calculators and processing power. Openness and ingenious software developers did the rest.

It’s time for the same thing to happen to our phones, games, and other devices.

Cross-posted at LawIsCool.com