Calling For Change

Unique in both scope and perspective, Calling for Change investigates the status of women within the Canadian legal profession ten years after the first national report on the subject was published by the Canadian Bar Association. Elizabeth Sheehy and Sheila McIntyre bring together essays that investigate a wide range of topics, from the status of women in law schools, the practising bar, and on the bench, to women's grassroots engagement with law and with female lawyers from the frontlines. Contributors not only reflect critically on the gains, losses, and barriers to change of the past decade, but also provide blueprints for political action. Academics, community activists, practitioners, law students, women litigants, and law society benchers and staff explore how egalitarian change is occurring and/or being impeded in their particular contexts. Each of these unique voices offers lessons from their individual, collective, and institutional efforts to confront and counter the interrelated forms of systemic inequality that compromise women's access to education and employment equity within legal institutions and, ultimately, to equal justice in Canada.

Unique in both scope and perspective, Calling for Change investigates the status of women within the Canadian legal profession ten years after the first national report on the subject was published by the Canadian Bar Association. Elizabeth Sheehy and Sheila McIntyre bring together essays that investigate a wide range of topics, from the status of women in law schools, the practising bar, and on the bench, to women's grassroots engagement with law and with female lawyers from the frontlines. Contributors not only reflect critically on the gains, losses, and barriers to change of the past decade, but also provide blueprints for political action. Academics, community activists, practitioners, law students, women litigants, and law society benchers and staff explore how egalitarian change is occurring and/or being impeded in their particular contexts. Each of these unique voices offers lessons from their individual, collective, and institutional efforts to confront and counter the interrelated forms of systemic inequality that compromise women's access to education and employment equity within legal institutions and, ultimately, to equal justice in Canada.

For too many years, the academic discipline of history has ignored American Indians or lacked the kind of open-minded thinking necessary to truly understand them. Most historians remain oriented toward the American experience at the expense of the Native experience. As a result, both the status and the quality of Native American history have suffered and remain marginalized within the discipline. In this impassioned work, noted historian Donald L. Fixico challenges academic historians--and everyone else--to change this way of thinking. Fixico argues that the current discipline and practice of American Indian history are insensitive to and inconsistent with Native people's traditions, understandings, and ways of thinking about their own history. In Call for Change, Fixico suggests how the discipline of history can improve by reconsidering its approach to Native peoples. He offers the "Medicine Way" as a paradigm to see both history and the current world through a Native lens. This new approach paves the way for historians to better understand Native peoples and their communities through the eyes and experiences of Indians, thus reflecting an insightful indigenous historical ethos and reality.

This book serves as a guidepost to a sensible approach to organizational change through normal decision-making cycles.

This report is organized around the following themes: (1) supply and demand for quality teachers (scholastic attainments of prospective teachers at the high school and college levels, demographic and social forces having an impact upon the recruitment of qualified students); (2) programs for teacher education (liberal education, subject specialization, professional education); (3) accountability for teacher education (state standards for teacher education programs, accreditation of teacher education programs); (4) resources for teacher education (school of education funding, allocation of resources for research and development, advanced degree programs); and (5) conditions necessary to support the highest quality of teaching (teacher salaries, advancement opportunities, work environments, status, autonomy). A broad analysis of each of the issues is provided and supported by empirical findings. A series of 16 recommendations is proposed to address the need for change and improvement. Included among the appendices is a listing of testimony presented at the commission hearings. (JD)

In 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Crawford v. Washington that testimonial hearsay is inadmissible at trial unless the declarant is available for cross-examination. Courts have subsequently struggled to define “testimonial hearsay,” but have often vaguely defined it as an out-of-court statement made for the primary purpose of establishing past events for use in future prosecution. Although Crawford intended to protect a defendant’s Sixth Amendment right to confrontation, in doing so, it overlooked the holding’s detrimental effects on two particular types of victims: domestic violence and rape victims. Under Crawford, domestic violence and rape victims’ out-of-court statements are likely to be considered testimonial because the sensitive and personal nature of these incidents often results in substantial deliberation prior to any declaration, as opposed to the impromptu declarations made during so-called ongoing emergencies. In turn, these statements are likely viewed as made for future prosecution. Moreover, domestic violence and rape victims have especially compelling and uniquely fragile psychological reasons to be unavailable for cross-examination, including being at risk at for re-traumatization. Yet, despite these reasons, Crawford still places pressure on these victims to be cross-examined in front of their perpetrators because testimonial hearsay evidence is often determinative in these types of trials, and thus an unavailable victim would lead to an increased likelihood of the perpetrator escaping conviction. This sensitivity and consequential unreliability surrounding the admissibility of testimonial hearsay upon which domestic violence and rape cases rely also disincentives prosecutors from pursuing these cases, further exacerbating the unlikelihood of conviction. To alleviate the detrimental impacts that Crawford has on both victims and trials, this Article suggests that Crawford’s essential terminology must be narrowly defined, exceptions to the ruling must be expanded upon, and victims must be adequately safeguarded.