Legal Education - Canada

Canada

In Canada, the system of legal accreditation is somewhere between that of the United States and those of the other Commonwealth countries, or (in the case of Quebec) Continental Europe.

The first-professional degree in law is the Bachelor of Laws (LL.B.) or Juris Doctor (J.D.), for common law jurisdictions, and the Bachelor of Laws, Licenciate of Law or Bachelor of Civil Law for Quebec, a civil law jurisdiction. Admittance to an LL.B. or J.D. program requires some previous undergraduate education, although, unlike ABA-approved J.D. programmes in the United States, a completed undergraduate degree is not necessarily required: most Canadian common law schools will accept exceptional applicants with only two to three years of previous university study. In practice, however, the vast majority of those who are admitted have already earned at least an undergraduate (bachelor's) degree. The change in academic nomenclature redesignating the principal common law degree as a J.D. rather than an LL.B., currently completed or under consideration at a number of Anglophone Canadian schools, has not affected the level of instruction. In the case of Quebec civil law degrees and the transsystemic LL.B/B.C.L. program at McGill University, students can be admitted after college.

Generally, entry into common-law LL.B. or J.D. programs in Canada is based primarily on a combination of the student's undergraduate grades as well as their score on the Law School Admission Test (LSAT). Factors such as community involvement, personal character, extracurricular activities and references are sometimes taken into account, but the LSAT remains far more determinative of admission than comparable standardized tests for other disciplines, such as the MCAT or GMAT. However, McGill, which enrolls all of its law students in a bilingual program of study, does not require applicants to write the LSAT; and the Universities of Calgary and Windsor are well known for assigning additional weight to extra-curricular factors. Quebec civil law schools do not require the LSAT, nor does the Université de Moncton École de droit, which offers the common-law J.D. program in French only. In the case of the University of Ottawa's common law school, the LSAT is required for the program given in English, but not for the program given in French.

Unlike the United States, all of Canada's law schools are affiliated with public universities, and are thus public institutions, a practice that is generally held to have helped reduce disparities in the quality of students and instruction between them. Since there is a limited number of positions in each law school's annual admissions, entry to all Canadian law schools is intensely competitive: most law schools receive far more applicants than they can accommodate. Most schools focus on their respective regions, and many graduates remain in the region in which the school is located, though the relatively uniform quality of the law schools affords greater geographic mobility to graduates. Still, it is typical in many provinces for the majority of members of the Barreau (law society) to come from one or two schools in the area.

After completing the Juris Doctor, LL.B. or equivalent, students must article for one year (in Quebec, "stage" is the equivalent to "articling"); this can be a challenge for those with lower grades, as there are often a shortage of articling positions, and completion of articles is required to be able to practice law in Canada. Articling involves on-the-job training, at a lower introductory salary, under the supervision of a lawyer licensed by the Provincial Bar who has been practising for a minimum of 5 years. After twelve to sixteen months of articling and call to the bar, attorneys are free to practice in their own right: many are hired by the same lawyer or firm for which they articled, while some choose to begin independent practices or accept positions with different employers. Others may leave the private practice of law to work in government or industry as a lawyer or in a law-related position. The great majority of Canadian lawyers do not elect to seek further academic degrees in law.