Laughing at the Gods (Cambridge University Press) is meant to be a companion to his popular 2011 book,  Is Eating People Wrong? Great Legal Cases and How They Shaped the World.

As Hutchinson told a gathering of mostly lawyers, law students and legal scholars at a recent launch of his new book, “Greatness, in anything, is not just about meeting the standards, or exceeding the standards, but changing them.” And that is the criteria he used in choosing which judges to showcase in Laughing at the Gods.

Even though Hutchinson, a Distinguished Research Professor at 91��ɫ’s Osgoode Hall Law School, refers to these eight judges as “great”, he says that interpretation is open to debate, as is the nature of their influence, good or bad. “The influence of these great judges has been, for good and bad, enormous,” he says.

“As such, this book is intended to open a conversation about some judges and their supposed greatness,” he writes in the book’s preface. It looks at some of the “main characters who have stood out among the judicial ranks,” those judges who have “helped to shape the world”. In this way the book is intended to spark conversation about certain judges and whether they are great.

Allan Hutchinson

Included in the book are England's Lord Mansfield laid the still-standing foundations of private law; America's John Marshall established the institutional importance of judicial review of legislative and executive action; Canada's Bertha Wilson opened up the judiciary to different and excluded viewpoints; and South Africa's Albie Sachs helped to turn a revolutionary movement into a democratic government.

“Great judges are nation-builders as well as game changers,” says Hutchinson.

But the book is “not intended as a hymn of praise for these memorable figures or the judicial function generally,” writes Hutchinson. Instead, it is an examination of “the common law enterprise and seeks to identify what it is that makes some of its judicial practitioners leaders in their field.”

A legal theorist, Hutchinson was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 2004 and received a University-Wide Teaching Award in 2007. He is interested in law and politics, legal theory, the legal profession, constitutional law, torts, jurisprudence, civil procedure and racism. Much of his work has been devoted to examining the failure of law to live up to its democratic promise.

He is also the author of Evolution and the Common Law (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and The Companies We Keep: Corporate Governance for a Democratic Society (Irwin Law, 2005), among others.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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Instead, every Monday night at 9pm, 91��ɫ faculty member Paul Delaney (right) and astronomy students from the Faculty of Science & Engineering welcome the world into the 91��ɫ Observatory for an evening of star gazing and conversation on their online radio show “The 91��ɫ Universe”.

The show, which is streamed live on the Internet radio station , airs at the same time as the observatory’s online .��

On Monday, March 26, Delaney and his students will host the 100th radio broadcast of "The 91��ɫ Universe". Since its initial broadcast in 2009, which was titled “Live from 91��ɫU”, the number of listeners who tune in regularly to the show has grown “astronomically”, says Delaney, who is a senior lecturer in the faculty’s Department of Physics & Astronomy and director of the observatory on the Keele campus.

“The popularity of the show has spread around the world,” he says.�� "It started during 91��ɫ’s 50th anniversary year and went live on Feb. 2, 2009, which also happened to be the International Year of Astronomy. Since then, it has been an incredible ride. We talk about anything to do with astronomy and space science.”

Between the live broadcast and repeats over the ensuing 24 hours, the show reaches some 16,000 listeners in more than 100 countries, according to statistics kept by astronomy.fm.�� Delaney says it is one of the station's biggest audiences.

An image of Jupiter, captured by the observatory

To celebrate the 100th show, Delaney is planning a webcam tour of the 91��ɫ Observatory to introduce listeners to the students and faculty working with the telescopes. The show will also feature a recap of what Delaney says has been a very busy week in astronomy.

As part of their show and online viewing, Delaney and the students answer questions from the public and field requests from astronomy buffs to have the telescope moved to view a particular planet or star cluster.

Over the years, the observatory has provided its audience with images of meteors and satellites and views of the Orion Nebula and Earth’s moon. The images are derived from the observatory’s 40-cm Schmidt-cassegrain and 60-cm classical cassegrain reflecting telescopes and are augmented by images from a wide-field, short focal length 90-mm diameter refractor and an all-sky meteor camera.

The show is part of 91��ɫ’s long-standing dedication to public education and the enthusiasm of undergraduate and graduate students in the observatory, says Delaney, who notes that students gain valuable experience in public speaking.

The graduate and undergraduate students working in the obsevatory will often speak to visitors about what they are seeing in the night sky

To listen to the 100th broadcast of "The 91��ɫ Universe", tune into on March 26 at 9pm.

Visit the website and follow the links to a selection of archived podcasts of previous shows. A link to the online viewing portal is also available on the website.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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For 91��ɫ architectural historian, Professor Shelley Hornstein (right), the relationship between memory and place has been a source of fascination for much of her academic career. Hornstein, who teaches architectural history and visual culture in 91��ɫ’s Faculty of Fine Arts, has authored a new book on the subject.�� Losing Site: Architecture, Memory and Place (Ashgate 2011) examines the relationship between memory and place and asks how architecture acts as a springboard to our memories.

Hornstein will launch Losing Site: Architecture, Memory and Place at a special event at the Gladstone Gallery located on the upper floor of Toronto's Gladstone Hotel on Sunday, Dec. 18. The launch will take place from 6 to 8pm and all are welcome.

In Losing Site, Hornstein explores how architecture exists as a material object and how it registers as a place that we come to remember beyond the physical site itself.��She questions what architecture is in the broadest sense, assuming that it is not just buildings.��The book connects architecture with geography, visual culture and urban studies.��It explores the infinite variations of how architecture maps our physical, mental or emotional space.

The book's title reflects Hornstein's understanding of culture, place and memory. "We've lost sight of what it means to be in a place, to experience, to know the physicality of a place," she says. "Losing Site plays with the ideas that bring together site and sight. How does architecture trigger memory?"

Each chapter explores this concept by providing a different example of the many ways that the physical place of architecture is curated by the architecture in our mental space, or what Hornstein calls our "imaginary toolbox" that we use when we remember or think of a place, look at a photograph, visit a site and describe it later to someone else or write about it on a postcard.

Right: From Losing Site, Dani Karavan, Passages - Homage to Walter Benjamin, 1994, Portbou, Spain.��Photograph by Shelley Hornstein

"Architecture is much broader than we imagine. It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that architecture is not only about buildings, but also about the construction of our physical landscape and how we relate to it…what our bodies do and mean in those spaces, as well as the mental maps and architectural constructions we build everyday in our minds and the worlds we build visually as we read fiction, for example," says Hornstein.

She notes that even a hedge dividing a garden from a road traces a line that not only divides a space into two places, but creates two new places that did not exist before. "We builds, demolish and shape space into architectural places that are meaningful to us," says Hornstein. "When those places disappear, do we remember them?"

Hornstein describes the project as the result of 10 years of writing and teaching that she never realized was a book all along. Writing the text was made possible after she was awarded the Walter L. Gordon Fellowship.

There were two challenges she encountered when writing the book. The first was how to knit together a series of seemingly unrelated case studies into a cohesive manuscript. The second was trying to convince herself that introducing what she thought was a wild and crazy idea about architecture to both the specialized architecture communities as well as the general public was indeed possible.

"What fascinated me while researching this book was that no matter who I would describe it to, each person responded with a personal story about the way they remembered a certain place," she says. "A wonderful book would be to record each of those responses!"

Following the launch, Hornstein will turn her attention to an international workshop she is organizing to orchestrate a course to be taught by 10 different colleagues in 10 different cities and countries on the theme "Starlets and Starchitecture: Women, Celebrity and Architecture Across Borders". She is also starting a book on the topic of demolition, which she describes as "an assemblage of case studies that riff on what it means to intentionally demolish architecture."

Losing Site: Architecture, Memory and Place is part of the Ashgate Studies in Architecture. The 182-page book includes 17 black-and-white illustrations.

By Jenny Pitt-Clark, YFile editor

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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