Queen’s hosts Canada’s second law journal conference

Conference speakers Katie Ireton and Professor Neil Craik (Waterloo) with the Queen's Law Journal's co-editor-in-chief Sharon Ford, Law ‘11, and faculty advisor Professor Emeritus Bernie Adell at the University Club on October 29, 2010.

Editors of scholarly law journals from across Canada gathered at Queen’s on October 29-31 for the Second National Law Journal Conference, hosted by the Queen’s Law Journal. The conference, “Better Scholarship, Better Pedagogy, Greater Openness,” was organized by Sharon Ford, Law '11, the current co-editor-in-chief of the Journal, and by other editorial board members, including Abbey Sinclair, Jonathan Chen, Jessica Horwitz, Patrick Pengelly and Karen Phung of Law '12.

Professor Neil Craik of the University of Waterloo and Katie Ireton (a recent UNB graduate now practising in Perth, Ontario) presented their new paper “Law Review: Scholarship and Pedagogy in Canadian Law Journals,” which they co-authored with Dean Philip Bryden of the University of Alberta Faculty of Law. The paper, which provided the basis for much of the discussion at the conference, will be published in the Spring 2011 issue of the Queen’s Law Journal.

The presentation canvassed trends in scholarly legal writing in Canada in recent decades, and discussed major challenges faced by student-edited law journals. Among the developments and challenges noted by Craik and Ireton were the changing balance between generalist journals and the rapidly growing number of specialized journals, the widespread use of peer review in mitigating the inexperience of student editors, the difficulties in operating an effective peer review process, and the problems posed by the American-inspired use of citation counts and other quantitative indicators as measures of journal quality.

“Law journals just ought to develop their own methodology for assessing success,” Craik said. “It probably is a useful exercise to think about how you measure success and whether you are achieving success, and how that occurs over time.”

Panels at the conference covered those developments and challenges, and also dealt with the balance between faculty and student involvement, the planning process, and the pedagogical role of law journals in Canadian law schools.

Representatives of nearly every student-run law journal across the country attended and participated actively, as did representatives of faculty-edited journals at Dalhousie and the University of Toronto. A highlight was a stimulating address by Professor Lee Epstein of Northwestern University, on how journals can help to improve the often shaky quality of empirical legal scholarship.

Because of the success of the event -- hosted five years after Queen's organized the first Canadian student-run law journals conference -- discussions are already underway on the possibility of holding a nation-wide conference every two years. Ford is excited by the prospect of seeing another opportunity for the community to put its collective heads together. “We just want to get more information out there about how journals operate,” she said. “It would be interesting to see in a few years where some journals are at, particularly the newer ones.”

Funding for the conference came from multiple sources, including Queen’s University, the Dean’s Excellence Fund, the Law Foundation of Ontario, the Canadian Bar Association, the Law Students’ Society and the Society of Graduate and Professional Students.