03/30/2026
This Tuesday! The final Special Topic Lecture of the year, featuring UVic's own, the beloved and award winning Professor Calder! Sharing the results of a study conducted in the Fall of 2024 with a generation of UVic Law alumni, asking them to connect the competencies they draw on in their day-to-day work with the courses, methods of teaching and evaluation they encountered at law school. This lecture will be mandatory for the incoming LSS Executive, but all students are invited to attend. It will be after the LSS Awards Presentations during the Dean's End of Year Social. So please come to that, grab some food, cheer on the award winners and then come to this incredibly insightful lecture.
The history of legal education in Canada is marked by a series of ebbs and flows in discord between the academy and the profession, often articulated starkly as a tension between theory and practice. The current moment feels like another one of these low tides – where there is pressure to move to a “competency-based assessment process” for admission to the Bar, with critique and conversation set solely within a dichotomous structure that constructs law schools and legal regulator foundationally at odds. This lecture takes up this challenge by shifting the frame and reimagining the processes of learning law to be as diverse as understandings of law itself, with multiple ways of knowing and being engaged, and critical attention paid to what teaching for “competency” might mean. How might we reimagine what “thinking like a lawyer” in the 21st century entails? What might be required for a change in perspective in how law could be taught to meet the goal the academy and the profession share – developing the humane professionals that our world demands?
