Saturday, February 1, 2014

Welcome Bernard Hibbitts!

Welcome to this month’s Guest Blogger, Bernard Hibbitts, who’ll be writing from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, where he is Professor of Law and where he publishes and edits JURIST, the legal news service he created at the Law School in 1996.  Professor Hibbitts has undergraduate and graduate degrees from Dalhousie Law School (in his hometown of Halifax, Nova Scotia), Oxford University (as a Rhodes Scholar), the University of Toronto (where he specialized in Canadian legal history), and the Harvard Law School (where he specialized in American legal history).  We look forward to posts on a number of topics.  Some will draw upon Lawyering: A History, a course on the history of the legal profession course he’s taught at Pitt Law since 2010.  Others might originate in his research on expat Canadians who’ve become lawyers in the United States.  I’m particularly looking forward to posts on the correspondence law schools of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  I once stumbled over them in the archives–if memory serves, when the proprietor of the Blackstone School of Law sought an endorsement from Elihu Root.  As an early mover in the legal professoriat’s encounters with the Internet, Professor Hibbits is in a unique position to draw out the implications of this earlier “technologically-driven ‘disruption’ of legal education” (as he puts it) for on-line instruction in the law today.  Welcome, Bernard!