Reports and Archived Materials

Law schools and the legal profession face a complex set of issues regarding legal education and legal practice in Canada. These issues arise from the distinct but also interrelated challenges of articling, diversity in the profession, numbers of foreign-trained lawyers, changing social and economic conditions, student debt, etc. These challenges require solutions that are deliberately and rationally tied to each, while accounting for their interconnections.

The principles provided below have been developed to guide law faculties as they take up the leadership challenges of legal education today and tomorrow. Legal education today does not replace the important knowledge and experience of the bar, but rather supports legal practitioners by providing a strong critical foundation for legal practice.

• One of the strengths of Canada is our diversity. Diversity is a core value of law faculties across the country and one of the signal strengths of Canadian legal education.
• Law is part of Canada’s social fabric. Change is in the nature of society and so too of law and the legal profession. It is essential, therefore, that law faculties both teach what is required today and educate graduates to solve new problems while adapting to new economic, legal, political, and social circumstances. Law graduates must be prepared to engage with a changing world able to take up a range of demanding and evolving legal careers.
• Canada is and always has been multi-juridical. Accordingly, legal education must transcend practice-readiness in a given jurisdiction and embrace the multiplicity of legal traditions in Canada including common law, civil law, Indigenous law, and international law. All legal education, and practice, today must include cultural competency to meet the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action.
• Legal education in universities provides the necessary context and academic training for legal practice. To prepare future lawyers for a changing world, university-based legal education provides a rich understanding of law, including legal pluralism, legal theories, economics and law, social justice and change, gender and legal feminism, democratic theories, human rights, and access to justice.
• University-based legal education provides the analytical, research, writing, speaking, and professionalism skills that are the foundation of legal practice. These skills are essential also to other roles lawyers occupy over the course of their careers, including in business, governance, international forums, and leadership generally.
• Today’s law schools offer a wide range of experiential learning opportunities that introduce students to diverse aspects of law in practice in settings such as clinics (e.g., business law, law and innovation, access to justice), field schools (e.g., environmental, Indigenous laws and various legal practice areas), case studies and moots (e.g., intellectual property, Indigenous legal methodologies, business, ethics), internships (e.g., public law, different government levels, business, criminal law, media law), and guest lectures (e.g., poverty law, Indigenous policies and governance, and various legal practitioners). These experiential learning opportunities enable students to apply their legal knowledge and academic training in problem-solving, advocacy, or law reform contexts. This holistic legal education is a rich and important aspect of legal education in Canada that produces effective and grounded lawyers who take up critical perspectives of law in practice.

Our constitution was adopted on November 4, 2011 and was amended in November 2013 to include a commitment to  the principles of equality and non-discrimination in the access to and the provision of, legal education.