Meet Jason Lamb, a rising second-year J.D. candidate and one of the Asper Centre’s student research assistants this summer.
Lamb’s main project is to help publish a special edition of the Supreme Court Law Review based on presentations at the Asper Centre’s public interest litigation conference in March. The journal edition will “be a lasting document to preserve this moment of our thinking,” he notes.
The papers examine the intersection of law and advocacy in a public context. “It’s a very wide-ranging topic that can cover all sorts of issues [such as] ethics in the legal profession, access to justice, advocating for housing rights, intervening at the Supreme Court — there are all kinds of ways that practitioners and academics approach that question,” Lamb says.
The project also involves significant inter-disciplinary research, which draws upon Lamb’s history and political science background.
“I’ve had to get abreast of all different areas of sociology [and] political science that I’ve left dormant since I’ve gone into law school,” he says. “I’m reviving a lot of stuff that I’ve learned in the past and am now applying it in the context of advocacy and lawyers, which is not something I’ve thought of before.”
Lamb wanted to work with the Asper Centre this summer because of his experience volunteering with the Refugee and Immigration Student Working Group during the school year. It made him realize the connections between the law and current affairs, and that law students “can start playing a small role in as an actual actor in the overall scheme of things, rather than someone who just observes.”
A long-time debater, Lamb is considering a litigation career, but is wary of working in a constantly adversarial environment. “I can see why it can wear someone down over time, he says. “But it’s an interesting challenge.”