Read. Watch. Listen. introduces you to the personal side of our faculty, staff and alumni. Participants are asked to answer three simple questions about their reading, viewing and listening habits – what one book or newspaper/magazine article is grabbing your attention; what one movie or television show has caught your eye; and what album/song, podcast or radio show are you lending an ear to.
Suzanne Chiodo is a professor in Western Law.
Today, she takes a turn on Read. Watch. Listen.
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Read.
Shortly after lockdown started, the courts in Ontario suspended their operations entirely for two weeks, and after that they were only hearing urgent cases for a while. That was quite a shock to the legal community.
In those two weeks, I read Richard Susskind’s Online Courts and the Future of Justice.
The book makes an impassioned case for our public dispute resolution process to go online, to become more user friendly, and to offer a range of legal services from legal education to mediation to the adjudication of disputes. While that kind of system is not perfect and needs to be tailored for Ontario, there is definitely a need for it – better to have an imperfect justice system than a dysfunctional one.
And it’s also COVID proof!
Watch.
My husband and I have been binge-watching Ozark. It’s such a dark show, but there’s also an undertow of dark humour to it. The acting and the script are fantastic and I love Jason Bateman, who plays one of the main characters. The show is about a family just trying to get by in suburban North America, which we can all identify with, except this one happens to be doing it by laundering money for a Mexican drug cartel.
Listen.
My music taste is pretty eclectic, but I’ve been listening to a lot of stuff from the 1980s. That was also a time of great upheaval (although I should note that I was too young to remember it). But it was also a time of hope that the upheaval would lead to a better world.
So, the music is very well suited to our times – songs like Bon Jovi’s Living on a Prayer and Bruce Springsteen’s Dancing in the Dark, that are bursting with desperation, energy, and hope that things will get better.
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If you have a suggestion for someone you would like to see in Read. Watch. Listen., or would like to participate yourself, drop a line to inside.western@uwo.ca.
