When York's Osgoode Hall Law School early last year launched TheCourt.ca, a blog and resource depository of daily news and opinion about the Supreme Court of Canada and its judgments, no one was quite sure how it would fly.
Well, TheCourt.ca has proved to be a tremendous success and has now been named the best new law blog of 2007 by the Canadian Law Blog Awards.
The success of the first year of TheCourt.ca is due to the tremendous efforts put forward by its crew of student editors and faculty supervisors. The blog was originally supervised by Professor Emeritus Simon Fodden and is now under the supervision of Osgoode Professor James Stribopoulos.
"Osgoode Hall’s The Court was easily the most important new Canadian law blog in 2007," said the Canadian Law judges. "Spearheaded by Simon Fodden, this group of law student editors is working hard to become the equivalent of the SCOTUS [Supreme Court of the United States] blog in the US. They’ve now got a full 12 months under their belt and it’s hard to argue they aren’t."
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| Above: The Court’s student editors. From the left: Evan VanDyk, Yu-Sung Soh, Naseem Mithoowani, Thomas Hughes, Julie Lanz, Jodi Martin, Tracy Brown, Prof. Simon Fodden, Julian Ho, Krystal Manitius, Corey Wall. |
Student editors, who each receive an honorarium for their services, are responsible for writing commentary themselves and for soliciting and editing commentary from scholars at Osgoode and elsewhere. At the same time, student editors work on maintaining a complete bibliography of scholarly works about the Court, biographies of the judges, and a history of the Court and its work. In addition, there are reports from scholars around the world about developments at their supreme courts.
"In introducing TheCourt.ca, our aim was to make it the place to go to for reliable and useful information about the Supreme Court," said Osgoode Hall Law School Dean Patrick Monahan. "That appears to be working, and I would like to offer congratulations to everyone involved in its first year of operation."
For more on TheCourt.ca, see the Jan. 16, 2007 issue of YFile.