Kirby to speak on lawyer wellbeing
Legal luminary Michael Kirby will this week join Marie Jepson, co-founder of the Tristan Jepson Memorial Foundation (TJMF), to help promote mental wellbeing in law schools and in the legal profession.
Legal luminary Michael Kirby (pictured) will this week join Marie Jepson, co-founder of the Tristan Jepson Memorial Foundation (TJMF), to help promote mental wellbeing in law schools and in the legal profession.
The two-day event will present new findings and initiatives to help students and professionals deal with the strains and pressures of the legal profession.
Former High Court judge Kirby, a patron of the TJMF, will address the tensions that exist in legal education and more broadly in the law, while Jepson will examine how a change in culture within the profession is ultimately needed to tackle mental ill-health and promote wellbeing.
The keynote speaker on Friday (22 February) will be professor Lawrence Krieger from Florida State University.
Krieger will discuss recent studies that reveal the foundations of the specific distress that law students and lawyers experience, while previewing new data from 8000 lawyers in four US states, highlighting the various sources of lawyer satisfaction and wellness.
Meanwhile, Melbourne Law School will tonight (20 February) host a free public lecture, Patents – Is Europe making a mess of things? Lessons for Australia?, where experts will be speaking on the difficulties in negotiating Europe’s patent regime.
On Monday and Tuesday next week (25 & 26 February) the law school will host Media, Communication Publics: 2013 Conference of the Centre for Media and Communications Law (CMCL), where lecturers and professionals will present new papers on topics ranging from the portrayal of women in the media to the issues of internet data retention.