Ultra Vires

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Why you should submit to Forum Conveniens

 You won’t believe #9!

Forum Conveniens is the University of Toronto Faculty of Law Review’s (say that five times fast, or just once) blog (that one’s easier). Forum publishes shorter articles, submitted by members of the Law Faculty community, on topical legal subjects. Even if you’re no Shakespeare, here’s why you should submit to Forum!

  1. Resumé booster: 

If law school wasn’t always the plan for you, you might feel like your resumé is a little lacking in legal experience. Writing for Forum can help remedy that by letting you put ‘Law Review author’ in that barren Extracurriculars section, right above being President of your undergrad university’s Dumb Irrelevant Club!

  1. Great conversation starter for OCIs:

OCIs can be a nerve wracking experience, especially when interviewers ask you crazy questions like ‘what was your favourite 1L class’ and ‘what areas of law do you find especially interesting’. If you write an article for the Forum, you’ve got a law-related conversational ace up your sleeve, ready to be deployed as needed. 

  1. Learn more about interesting legal topics:

Can’t get enough of torts? Just jonesing for in-depth analysis of arcane contracts issues? Me neither! But this had to be a list of ten, so, here we are. If you’re the kind of person who asks sincere questions to spark legal debate in your law school group chat, the Forum needs you just as much as you need an outlet for your overflowing legal mind. 

  1. Find another use for papers that you spent too long on: 

Wasted a whole weekend on a paper that barely cracked an H? Never fear! If you submit to the Forum, we can guarantee that our readership will also be mildly impressed with it, giving you more ROI for your sacrificed free time. Plus, we copyedit all the Forum submissions we publish, so you don’t even need to worry about the typos that knocked you down from an HH!

  1. Have something to post on LinkedIn for the first time since you started law school: 

Are you worried that people you know from highschool might think you’re dead? Write for Forum! Once you’re published, you can post the article on LinkedIn along with a caption about what becoming a published author taught you about B2B SAAS sales, deeply confusing your network. By keeping them on their toes, you’re sure to have them stalking the rest of your social pages to see what’s going on with you in no time.

  1. Brag that you’re a published author on dates: 

What’s more irresistible than red roses, dark chocolate, and the complex rhythms of Cbat? Dropping hints to your dates that you’re an author (of a law school blog post, no less). You may not be able to write your beloved sonnets comparing them to a summer’s day, but you can write about such titillating issues as how Vavilov remade Canadian administrative law, or how Peoples and BCE have left corporations law a virtual wasteland (I can practically hear your date’s pupils dilating). Please note, this only works as a seductive technique if you can still also pay for the date. 

  1. Help me decide if it’s ‘Forum’ or ‘the Forum’:  

Sometimes I write Forum, sometimes I write ‘the Forum’. Forum alone feels a little bit more correct, since it’s the proper name of the thing, like Facebook. But on the other hand, the word ‘forum’ is also used generically for online discussion pages, so sometimes calling it ‘the Forum’ sounds better? It’s a bit like we named the website just Blog, so sometimes it feels weird to not call it ‘the Blog’. If you have conclusive thoughts on this issue, please submit an article outlining your arguments in favour of one usage or the other.

  1. Give the editors something to do: 

The Forum editors are a bit like Border Collies: incredibly intelligent, eager, and will start tearing up the drywall if they don’t have a job to do. Without your submissions, they’re just enjoying their lives, not overloaded with work, tumbleweeds blowing around in their inboxes. Are you going to stand by and let that happen? Submit your way-too-long articles and give these workaholics something to get out of bed for!

  1. Help me solve the DB Cooper case: 

In 1971, a mysterious man known as D.B. Cooper hijacked a plane, managing to extort $200,000 in ransom money before parachuting from the aircraft to an unknown fate. Cooper has never been identified, and what became of him and the ransom money is still unknown. I’ve been working on a theory, and with your help, we can finally prove that D.B. Cooper actually adopted an English accent and became a humble property professor in Toronto, Canada. Please submit any evidence you have tying said professor to this notorious hijacking to the Forum using our submission form. 

  1. Give me something to do: 

The Editors-in-Chief have me writing Ultra Vires articles, for crying out loud! Only people with way too much free time do that. If you don’t submit some articles, they’ll probably make me write a Forum sketch for Law Follies, too (meetings at 12:30 on Mondays). Save me!* 

*To anyone who has written to the Forum inbox to whom I have not responded, please know this is a joke and I am working busily to respond to your request. 

**To my Editors-in-Chief, please see above.

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