Pat Hart

PhD, Religious Studies/occasional lawyer //“They say there’s a heaven for those who will wait. Some say it’s better but I say it ain’t.”

[Southpaw @4thlineVoice]

#EnforcerBasedPodcasting
Episode 478 w/ Mark Raiter
https://t.co/FmAqBIxog8
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[Pat Hart @path94]

@DepthsofTime97 It *might* be a Canadian thing. It took me a while, but I’ve grown to appreciation even, in limited doses. There is no denying their immense talent as musicians.

[Pat Hart @path94]

@Justin_Gaethje @BlessedMMA You’re a dog, too. You guys are both incredible warriors. 👊🏼

[FADE @FadeAwayMedia]

This is probably the coldest angle of the greatest KO in UFC history

#UFC300

[Pat Hart @path94]

@DNetolitzky

[Pat Hart @path94]

@DNetolitzky Wow. We need this in Alberta.

[Rakhi Pancholi @pancholi_rakhi]

I can’t stop looking at @rebeccakschulz’s face during this callously cruel and inaccurate response from the Premier.

Schulz was Minister of Children’s Services when the deaths of children & young people in the child intervention system rose sharply and continue to rise at unprecedented levels.

She met regularly with the Child & Youth Advocate who report on how over-represented 2SLGBTQ+ young people are in the child intervention system.

She knows all this.

And she stood there with a straight face and said nothing.

That’s the face of someone who has lost their moral compass.

[Pat Hart @path94]

@dripping_roast @DNetolitzky This is absolutely fascinating, thank you so much for this Ms. McLelland! And I think that there is much to be said for your observation (and @DNetolitzky’s similar one) on what you describe as “medium chill.”

[Pat Hart @path94]

@DNetolitzky @dripping_roast @rob_bristow_CA 👏

[Pat Hart @path94]

@dripping_roast This line from Anderson is deeply ingrained me, and I’d like to think it guides my orientation when it comes to estate litigation. But sadly, I don’t think that Justice Anderson’s entirely legitimate lament is given near the attention and consideration it deserves.

[Dr Donald J Netolitzky KC @DNetolitzky]

Had a visit from "Reviewer 2" with one of my court statistics papers. Reviewer 2 said my now accepted paper was unworthy of being in a law journal - it wasn't "scholarly".

Reviewer 2 was right. It's not "scholarly". It's "scientific".

There's a difference.

I'm no scholar. Never made any claims otherwise, except perhaps I do have some expertise in pseudolaw. But that’s not “real law”, so who cares?

(Yeah, I’ve had multiple publications rejected on that basis too! One of the obstacles to working in that subject area. Newbs to the topic - beware!)

Rather, I self-identify as a microbiologist/biochemist who just happens to work in law due to a matrix of past events. I really don’t care much about the “scholarly” aspects of law, the philosophies and underlying principles, such as they are. “Ethics”, balancing this and that. I don’t pretend to comprehend much of that. I find those are just word games, and - to me - so much gibberish. Luckily for someone so unsophisticated and intellectually limited, there is something I can do that I enjoy very much.

I like data. I like measuring things. That’s me, scientist. I like to learn how things work. Or don’t work. Since I am extremely limited in a “scholarly” sense, I count, calculate, and graph data, rather than sit around and imagine institutions like courts as sky-castles, evaluated on ethereal standards. I know to non-scientists it’s probably weird, but when I discovered there was a very strong linear relationship between court filings and docket entries, I was literally running around, showing off the graph. But that’s science, not “law”.

Another reason I do that is I work inside a court, and, let me tell you friend, it’s no sky-castle. The institution is a relentless gnashing sausage factory of processes that we insiders watch, day after day, in a grey fog. Yeah, not at all as romantic as they make it sound in law school. But, as a part of the sausage factory, I’m intellectually interested in how these mechanisms operate, in a time and motion and engineering sense. So are the judges I work with. They, too, are not often “scholarly”, but in this sense technicians.

Nobody seems to actually disagree that law and the legal mechanisms in Canada have big problems. All sorts of “crises”. One, in my opinion, is we know practically nothing about how courts and litigation work. Oh, yes, there’s lots of claims about “the trouble with law”, particularly from appellate courts and legal academics, but there’s almost never any data to back that up.

And there is where my attention falls. Sure isn’t scholarly, but wouldn’t you like to know, for example, that Canadian appeal courts appear to have been receiving a steady decrease of input litigation over the past 25 years? To the point one provincial court of appeal is receiving 1/5th as many criminal appeals? Kind of a significant shift in the litigation landscape.

Well, I do. But I’m just a scientist. And most certainly no scholar. I want data. And with data, I ask more questions, like “why?!”

And, frankly, that kind of data-driven investigation makes my head hurt a lot less than trying to interpret Charter s 15 jurisprudence.

[Southpaw @4thlineVoice]

#WHL
Mark Raiter
.... tougher than a left turn downtown

[Pat Hart @path94]

@DNetolitzky I confess to giggling a bit at this line: “I’ll take it the PhD in question is me. That's OK. It’s a microbiology degree, after all, not law.”

It’s a sentiment that resonates with me. 😂

[Pat Hart @path94]

Wonderful working with my friend and brilliant scholar @PeterJosephSabo on this.

https://t.co/guEBAwTi5n

[Pat Hart @path94]

@UbakaOgbogu @andrew_leach To be clear, I’m not suggesting a big pat on the back to the U of A for a job well done with EDI. But I think that there’s progress. I guess we’ll agree to disagree on what occasioned my initial comment: I don’t see the new policy as regressive in comparison to the legacy policy.

[Pat Hart @path94]

@UbakaOgbogu @andrew_leach There was no “congratulating” in my remark. But regardless, with respect to the comment about how many have been hired *since*, is there much data to draw from on this, given that it’s only been what, a year and half or so that’s passed since those hires?

[Pat Hart @path94]

@UbakaOgbogu @andrew_leach Though full disclosure: I say this as a white male who has applied in the past for postings at the law faculty and never reached even an interview stage.

[Pat Hart @path94]

@UbakaOgbogu @andrew_leach I don’t see the U of A’s policy as regressive. And I think something also deserving of at least some consideration on that front is the U of A joining peer institutions with the Black academic excellence cohort hire. The U of A hardly strikes me as EDI-ignorant.

[Pat Hart @path94]

@andrew_leach @UbakaOgbogu Given the broad scope of the U of A policy that Andrew points to, the change to 12.12 doesn’t strike me as an affront to hiring under-represented groups. On the contrary, by having 12.12 point in the direction of this relevant policy, that general objective seems even stronger.

[Pat Hart @path94]

@DNetolitzky “Amen” 😉