COVER STORY
Greetings from Simon Fraser University and the Master of Arts in Applied Legal Studies Dr. Margaret I. Hall, LLB, LLM, PhD Professor, Simon Fraser University (School of Criminology), Society of Notaries Public of BC Chair in Applied Legal Studies and Director of the Master of Arts in Applied Legal Studies (MA-ALS) Graduate Program Dr. Hall’s current research interests include law and aging, mental capacity and undue influence, legal responses to vulnerability, MAiD, and systemic theories of liability in tort law. Dr. Hall is the author of numerous academic publications, including (as a co-author) Canadian Tort Law. Prior to joining SFU in Fall 2019, Dr. Hall was an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law at Thompson Rivers University (as a founding member of that faculty) and an Assistant Professor in the UBC Faculty of Law. Dr. Hall has also worked in law reform and was the first Director of the Canadian Centre of Elder Law Studies. Dr. Hall is an Adjunct Professor at the Australian Centre for Health Law Research in the Faculty of Law at the Queensland University of Technology (Brisbane, Australia) and a Research Affiliate at the Centre for Research on Personhood in Dementia (University of British Columbia).
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Dr. Margaret Hall
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t is my great pleasure to have been invited to participate in this special issue of The Scrivener on The Education of BC Notaries. I would like to take this opportunity to provide an overview of the Program—our objectives, our approach to teaching students about the law, and our courses— and also provide a few words about the areas of law that I teach in the Program. Many readers will be familiar with (and some will be graduates of) the MA-ALS Program, now in its 13th year. Graduation from the Program is one pre-requisite for admittance into The Society of Notaries Public. Students in the Program take nine courses over 16 months including • Contracts, Property, and Personal Planning (advance planning instruments and Wills and estates); • Selected Topics in Applied Legal Studies (including business organizations, agency, tax, builders liens, and personal property security); • Legal Research and Writing; • Legal Philosophy; • Topics in Legal Practice; and • a course on Canadian Law and Legal institutions. The latter course is designed to give students from diverse educational and professional backgrounds essential foundational knowledge about the law and about the Canadian legal system; unlike Quebec’s Master’s Degree in Notarial Law (available only to
BC Notaries Association
Volume 30 Number 1 Spring 2021
