Thanks, readers

At the Law Society symposium yesterday on "Lawyers and Canada at 150," it was a pleasure to meet, even briefly, some friends of this blog who took the trouble to come out -- and to say hello.

I should also say that the lunch I mentioned yesterday was less in our honour than to salute the Hon Harry Laforme, justice of the Ontario Court of Appeal and member of the Mississauga of the Credit First Nation, who was awarded an honorary doctorate at the call to the bar ceremony held earlier that day.

At our (well-attended, widely webcast) event, there were a lot of provocative and original talks. The one that sticks with me this morning is Hamar Foster's on the lawyer Arthur O'Meara and his clients the Nisga'a Nation of the Pacific Northwest Coast, gamely insisting on the legal reality of aboriginal title before the First World War -- and being consistently stymied and blocked for the next sixty years or so. Hamar has written about him before, but the story remains little known