Reflections from the Founder of Ultra Vires

Melissa Kluger looks back on why she started the newspaper

To be honest, I don’t feel much older than the average law student. And it doesn’t seem all that long ago that I was taking classes in Flavelle and meeting up with friends at Bora’s head.

But when Ultra Vires editors Melody Chan and James Flynn asked me to reflect on why I founded this newspaper two decades ago, I realized that an alarming amount of time had passed.

I hate to begin any sentence with “back in my day,” but a 20-year-reflection kind of calls for it. So here we go: Back in my day, a lot of things were different. I started law school in 1998. It would be another four years before I got my first cell phone. The Twin Towers were still standing in New York City. And I used Google for the first time as a second-year student.

What’s changed most over the past two decades, however, is the media. Not only on a global level, with the rise of the Internet, social media, and fake news. But also right here at the law school. When I arrived at the Faculty of Law, there was only one way to read campus news. On a weekly basis, the administration put together a collection of notices. Headnotes, as it was called, was a pretty thick pile of paper, stapled together with a brightly coloured cover. There was no real art to it. If you had anything to announce to your fellow students, you put it on a piece of paper, and it got added to that week’s pile. Every student got a copy. There was also a humour paper that came out once or twice a year. That was it.

That’s why I felt so strongly that the law school needed a student newspaper. We needed a real voice: a place to celebrate our successes, share a few laughs, and tackle important topics. We also needed a forum to voice opinions and ideas that were unpopular with the administration. The newspaper became a place to speak out against tuition increases, to challenge the pressure we felt to work on Bay Street, and to question the Americanization of our law school (the JD replaced the LLB while I was at U of T). Let’s face it: we weren’t getting any pages in Headnotes for these topics.

Since the launch of UV, the changes to the media landscape have been dramatic. Print media struggles to survive, while Internet behemoths like Facebook now curate our online media diet. This change has empowered students with new ways to express themselves and voice their opinions. Now, if you have something to say, you self-publish your perspective on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Instagram. You can build your own website, publish an e-newsletter, start a podcast or upload a video to YouTube. All of which can be done for way less cash than printing your own newspaper.

And yet, despite this major shift in how to communicate and start discussion, Ultra Vires is still thriving. A good, old-fashioned newspaper. I think that’s because we crave independent journalism now more than ever. Sure, it’s great to have new platforms to express oneself, but nothing can replace a deeply-researched, well-written, and carefully edited story overseen by a team of students who are committed to raising important issues and bringing relevant stories to the community. 

Their hard work uncovers unfairness, dispels rumours, and pushes for change. The newspaper’s annual recruitment special (included in this issue) is an outstanding example of the power of journalism: it holds law firms, the law school, and the Law Society of Ontario to account. Ultra Vires wields an incredible amount of power and it does not squander it. 

Thank you to all my classmates who helped to launch UV and to every student who has contributed. And thank you in advance to all the contributors who are yet to come. I cannot imagine what the law school will look like in the next 10 or 20 years, but I know it will continue to need independent student journalism. 

Melissa Kluger (’01) is the founder and CEO of Law and Style Media Inc., which publishes Precedent Magazine, PrecedentJD, and The Precedent A-List. 

Editor’s Note: This article is part of a special feature to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Ultra Vires. An article about recurring trends in the paper and another about our top 5 coolest stories can be found here and here respectively.