Summer is just around the corner!

Happy Groundhog Day everyone - while all indications from our furry friends coast-to-coast seem to be that we're in for another 6 weeks of winter this year, my mind has been turned towards summer over the past week or so. The reason is that my flurry of job applications that I mentioned in a previous post have run their course and at the end of the day, I was fortunate to have a lot of good news come to pass. I had applied to several large firms in Toronto (more for the experience, given that 1L firm jobs are extremely rare) but was pleasantly surprised to receive some interview offers, which is a really good indication for the future if I choose to spend some time in the private sector after I graduate. However, I ultimately politely thanked the firms but declined to interview, because something even better, and probably more rewarding, came along too. Last week, I was elected to serve on the Executive of the Downtown Legal Services Clinic, where I currently volunteer. This will mean that next year, I'll be working alongside 5 other fantastic law students as well as the clinic's review lawyers to train new volunteers, run the day-to-day operations of the clinic, and generally do our best to improve the volunteer experience for students as well as the level of service we provide to our clients. Another part of the deal is that as an Exec, I'm automatically entitled to a summer position with the clinic, which I happily accepted.

As a summer student, I'll have an opportunity to work on several criminal files at the same time - this will help me hone my ability to "legal-multitask" and because our clinic tends to schedule a lot of the major file work for the summer students, it also means there is a very high likelihood that I'll be conducting at least one, and probably more, trials during the summer. While it will definitely be a bit intimidating and I'm very aware of the massive responsibility that I'd be taking on, I feel that there's no better way for me to learn and apply the law while doing something rewarding and helpful at the same time. So needless to say, I'm estatic and will be very much looking forward to my first summer here in Toronto.

But of course, there's still a long way to go before May - and February is shaping up to be an intense month. This week I'm meeting with the rest of my Law Review group to go over the 9 submissions we're in charge of evaluating, I have to prepare a "statement of claim" with my friend Aaron who is my partner for the annual "mock trial" advocacy competition in a couple of weeks, I'm working with the review lawyers at the clinic on honing my client counselling skills for my trip to Michigan, and I've scheduled a Red Cross conference call later in the week to take the pulse on our local efforts to support Haiti relief. On top of it all, I also have my second small group paper due Monday, in which I need to write a mock Supreme Court judgment supporting the proposition that the Canadian Forces must respect the Charter of Rights and Freedoms when handing over detainees captured in Afghanistan to that country's national security forces. It's honestly a little much, even for me - am finding that I'm working straight through until 11-11:30 most nights, and aside from eating/sleeping/occasional trips to the gym/commute on the subway, there's not really any room for leisure. I'm hoping that things will settle down during Reading Week (Feb 15-19) at least enough for me to get caught up in all my classes, but for now, I'm just taking things one day at a time.

In that spirit, I'm going to keep this to be a very short post today, and consider it more of an "update on me" instead of a full discussion of something interesting going on in the world around us, though next time what I might do is post an excerpt from my paper so you can get a feel for just how complicated the Afghan detainee issue is. Until then, stay warm and enjoy the winter while it lasts!