UV Alumni Spotlight
Welcome to the inaugural article in Ultra Vires’ (UV) Alumni Spotlight series, where Ultra Vires reconnects with its alumni to discuss what they’ve been up to since graduation. On January 18, we sat down with Brett Hughes to discuss the role of student journalism at the Faculty. Hughes was co-valedictorian of the graduating class of 2016 and the 2015-2016 Editor-in-Chief of UV.
What has the trajectory of your legal career been so far?
When I was in law school, I didn’t do a Bay Street summer. I was a research assistant for Professor Ariel Katz in first year and I worked at the Advocates for Injured Workers legal clinic in second year. I knew that I wanted to work in something related to workers’ rights, so I managed to get a clerkship at the Ontario Superior Court for articling. If you’re interested in being a litigator, being at a trial court is much more directly relevant because you can be in court watching cross-examinations, opening and closing arguments, and the aspects of day-to-day litigation that take up most practices. I ended up at a boutique called Dewart Gleason LLP. We have a union-side labour law practice, a civil litigation practice, and a bit of a niche police accountability practice.
Your writings at UV shed light on Faculty Council meetings and financial changes occurring at the school. Do you rely on your experience in law school in your current practice?
Certainly. At the level of principles, it’s easy to draw links between the work at Ultra Vires and working in a field like labour and employment law. In the law school context, you have university administrators who wield a great deal of power over both the day-to-day operations of the law school, but also who gets into law school in the first place and by extension the legal profession. By simply showing up to Faculty Council meetings, asking questions, and writing stories about them, you bring attention to these issues and hopefully bring about some degree of change. It’s the same thing in the workplace. The vast majority of employees don’t wield a great deal of power individually. Workplace unions are one way of helping them do that. Working with union clients to help challenge employers’ decisions shares similar principles with the work at UV.
It is also practically useful in a day-to-day sense. With Ultra Vires, a lot of the interesting interviews that we’ve had involve asking difficult questions to authority figures like the Dean and Assistant Deans. That is not something that necessarily comes naturally to people. Putting your hand up at Faculty Council or sending emails to law professors to get their comments was good training for conducting cross-examinations or an examination for discovery. The question-asking skills and following up on non-responsive answers have proven quite helpful on a more practical level to being a litigator. Lawyers should be comfortable asking tough questions.
Your writing also focuses on lack of financial accessibility and diversity at the law school. Years later we’re still writing about the same issues. What do you think the role of a school newspaper like UV is for the law school community?
One thing unique about a law school newspaper is that you have a relatively small but engaged readership in the law school and legal communities. If you don’t have something like UV pulling together statistics on how tuition is increasing far faster than financial aid, then it’s going to be difficult for students to engage in advocacy, or even develop informed opinions on the issue. The community of student editors and journalists who take the time to dig through a variety of information sources to compile it and present it to the students prompts discussions about these issues. These conversations might not happen if all we had were the official channels of communication from university leadership.
One of the other important things that UV does is it gives people a platform to share their experiences about things like mental health and their interactions with the accommodation system. When you’re one of several hundred law students just starting law school, it’s easy to feel as if your experience is an outlier to everyone else’s. Bringing individual experiences to the forefront helps people realize they’re not alone. Depending on how common the experiences are, it may lead organically to advocacy.
Ultra Vires’ contributors are law students who have to balance the paper, schoolwork, and other extracurricular activities. What are your thoughts on the nature of student journalism?
It is unfortunate that a lot of the work that student journalists, the student government, and other student activists do is work that shouldn’t be theirs in the first place. The school’s leadership should be concerned with things like affordability, mental health, and creating a diverse law school. It’s not something that should fall on the shoulders of students — especially when they have in some cases over $100,000 in debt and have extremely high workloads (i.e. keeping up with readings, writing exams, and preparing for job interviews). It can be a burden to use whatever free time you have left to engage in accountability journalism.
The decline of traditional news media has affected UV as well because we rely heavily on print ad revenue to sustain operations. This year many of our issues will be virtual due to the pandemic. What should UV do to stay relevant and engaging, especially for its alumni community?
There was something nice about picking up a physical copy of the paper, eating a doughnut, and reading and talking about the articles together. I do hope you’d be able to find a way to maintain the print edition after the pandemic, because UV is a valuable piece of community-building, and those in-person discussions are not quite the same as Twitter. I know the firms that pay for advertising do it because it is helpful to build brand awareness, but I like to think they also do it because they recognize the value of student newspapers.
Do you have any advice for current law students involved with Ultra Vires?
When you’re involved with the student newspaper you gain a certain type of knowledge about the legal world that is not easily accessible to students. You’re pouring through the OCI numbers so you have a good sense of the mechanics of the recruitment process. You’re talking to alumni and learning about their career paths in a much more extensive way potentially than just talking to the mentor who’s been assigned to you. You’re talking to law professors by attending Faculty Council meetings so you become a lot more knowledgeable about the legal world in a way that is valuable on a social and cultural level.
I was scrolling through some of the old UV pieces and a lot of the advice that gets trotted out year after year is quite true in that there are dozens and hundreds of different paths to success in the legal world. I wouldn’t want to be very prescriptive about what law students should do because there’s not one right way of doing it.
