Bernard J. Hibbitts

Bernard Hibbitts is Publisher & Editor-in-Chief of JURIST, the Webby award-winning legal news service he created at the Law School in 1996 which now draws over 100,000 readers a week worldwide. His scholarship and teaching focus on how the Internet and other media - e.g. speech, writing, print, radio and TV - have historically shaped legal thought and practice.

Professor Hibbitts attended law school at England's Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. He later obtained additional law degrees at Dalhousie Law School in his hometown of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, the University of Toronto, and finally Harvard Law School, where he was Associate Editor of the Harvard International Law Journal. He clerked at the Supreme Court of Canada for Justice Gerald LeDain.

Hibbitts' innovative use of multimedia presentations, role-playing, and other creative teaching techniques has earned him the Pitt law students' Excellence-in-Teaching Award, and the University-wide Chancellor's Distinguished Teaching Award. From 1996-2000 he was Pitt Law's Associate Dean for Communications and Information Technology.

Hibbitts' scholarship has been published in Law and History Review, New York University Law Review, International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, McGill Law Journal, American Ethnologist, and Wired Magazine, and is widely available on the Internet; in 1996, he became the first law professor to publish a full-length scholarly article online before publishing it in print in a traditional law review. That article, Last Writes?: Re-assessing the Law Review in the Age of Cyberspace, later became the subject of a special law review symposium and remains controversial.

Programs

• JURIST - Publisher and Editor-in-Chief

Currently Teaching

• Ancient Law Seminar (Fall 08)
• Legal History: The Technology of Law Seminar (Fall 08)
• Estates and Trusts (Spring 09)

Courses Previously Taught

• American Legal History
• English Legal History
• Neteracy for Lawyers
• Property

Selected Publications

Websites

• JURIST

Articles

• "Her Majesty's Yankees: The Use of American Authorities in the Courts of Victorian Nova Scotia" in The Supreme Court of Nova Scotia: 250th Anniversary Commemoration (Jim Phillips and Philip Girard ed., University of Toronto Press, 2004).
• "'Our Arctic Brethren': Canadian Law and Lawyers as Portrayed in American Legal Periodicals, 1829-1911," in Essays in Canadian Law, Vol. VIII: In Honour of Richard Risk (Blaine Baker & Jim Philips, eds., University of Toronto Press, 1999).
• "Legal History Meets the World Wide Web," 17 Law & History Review 385 (1999)
• "Yesterday Once More: Skeptics, Scribes and the Demise of Law Reviews," 30 Akron Law Review 277-320 (1996)
• "Last Writes? Re-assessing the Law Review in the Age of Cyberspace," 71 New York University Law Review 615-688 (1996)
• "Senses of Difference: A Sociology of Metaphor in American Legal Discourse," in Law and the Senses (Lionel Bentley and Leo Flynn [King's College, London] eds., 1996: Pluto Press).
• "Making Motions: The Embodiment of Law in Gesture," 6 Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues 51-81 (1995)
• "Making Sense of Metaphors: Visuality, Aurality and the Reconfiguration of American Legal Discourse," 16 Cardozo Law Review 229-356 (1994)
• "The Politics of Principle: Albert Venn Dicey and the Rule of Law," 23 Anglo-American Law Review 1-31 (1994)
• 'Coming to Our Senses': Communication and Legal Expression in Performance Cultures," 41 Emory Law Journal 873-960 (1992)
• "A Change of Mind: The Supreme Court of Canada and the Board of Railway Commissioners, 1903 1929," 40 University of Toronto Law Journal 60-113 (1991)
• "Progress and Principle: The Legal Thought of Sir John Beverley Robinson," 34 McGill Law Journal 454-529 (1989)
• "A Bridle for Leviathan: The Supreme Court and the Board of Commerce," 21 Ottawa Law Review 65-117 (1989)
• "ILJ Survey: Curricula, Extracurricular Activities and Placement Programs in International Law," 29 Harvard International Law Journal 299-316 (1988) [with Robert Johnson, Teresa Burke and Perpetua Tranlong; unsigned]
• "The Impact of the Iran-Iraq Cases on the Law of Frustration of Charterparties," 16 Journal of Maritime Law and Commerce 441-466 (1985)

Awards and Honors

• Webby People's Voice Award 2006 (for JURIST)
• Chancellor's Distinguished Teaching Award (1995)
• Excellence in Teaching Award (1993)

Selected Professional Activities

• Co-Director, University of Pittsburgh Center for National Preparedness, 2004-2006
• Board of Directors, Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI), 1999-2004
• Editorial Board, H-Net (American Society of Legal History legal and constitutional history listserv and website), 1998-1999