Tending the Bar: The Good Character Requirement for Law Society Admission
Every Canadian law society requires that applicants for bar admission be of “good character. ”The author assesses the administration of this requirement and its stated purposes of ensuring ethical conduct by lawyers, protecting the public and maintaining the profession’s reputation. In particular, the premise underlying the use of the good character requirement to fulfill those purposes - that character is the “well-spring of professional conduct in lawyers” - is subjected to critical examination through the theoretical principles of Aristotelian virtue ethics and the empirical evidence of social psychology. The primary thesis of this paper is that as currently justified, administered and applied the good character requirement cannot be defended and must not be maintained. The secondary thesis of the paper, however, is that given the relationship - albeit a qualified one - between character and ethical conduct, a reformed version of the good character requirement can, and arguably should, be maintained by the provincial law societies.
Canadian Legal Ethics: Ready for the Twenty-First Century at Last
This article analyzes the transformation in the scholarship of legal ethics that has occurred in Canada over the last decade, and maps out an agenda for future research. The author attributes the recent growth of Canadian legal ethics as an academic discipline to a number of interacting factors: a response to external pressures, initiatives within the legal profession, changes in Canadian legal education, and the emergence of a new cadre of legal ethics scholars. This article chronicles the public history of legal ethics in Canada over the last decade and analyzes the first and second wave of scholarship in the area. It integrates these developments within broader changes in legal education that set the stage for the continued expansion of Canadian legal ethics in the twenty-first century.
Intelligibility of modified speech for young listeners with normal and impaired hearing.
Exposure to modified speech has been shown to benefit children with language-learning impairments with respect to their language skills (M. M. Merzenich et al., 1998; P. Tallal et al., 1996). In the study by Tallal and colleagues, the speech modification consisted of both slowing down and amplifying fast, transitional elements of speech. In this study, we examined whether the benefits of modified speech could be extended to provide intelligibility improvements for children with severe-to-profound hearing impairment who wear sensory aids. In addition, the separate effects on intelligibility of slowing down and amplifying speech were evaluated. Two groups of listeners were employed: 8 severe-to-profoundly hearing-impaired children and 5 children with normal hearing. Four speech-processing conditions were tested: (1) natural, unprocessed speech; (2) envelope-amplified speech; (3) slowed speech; and (4) both slowed and envelope-amplified speech. For each condition, three types of speech materials were used: words in sentences, isolated words, and syllable contrasts. To degrade the performance of the normal-hearing children, all testing was completed with a noise background. Results from the hearing-impaired children showed that all varieties of modified speech yielded either equivalent or poorer intelligibility than unprocessed speech. For words in sentences and isolated words, the slowing-down of speech had no effect on intelligibility scores whereas envelope amplification, both alone and combined with slowing-down, yielded significantly lower scores. Intelligibility results from normal-hearing children listening in noise were somewhat similar to those from hearing-impaired children. For isolated words, the slowing-down of speech had no effect on intelligibility whereas envelope amplification degraded intelligibility. For both subject groups, speech processing had no statistically significant effect on syllable discrimination. In summary, without extensive exposure to the speech processing conditions, children with impaired hearing and children with normal hearing listening in noise received no intelligibility advantage from either slowed speech or envelope-amplified speech.