All Posts Tagged With: "law"

If you don’t make the cut in Canada, Bond University wants you

It was 3 a.m. as Warren Beil tried to toss a garbage bag into a dumpster and it burst over his head. At that moment, the Vancouver kitchen manager decided that it was time to explore other career opportunities. “I don’t want to be a chef,” he said to himself. “I think I’m going to go to law school.” It was December 2003, and he had already missed application deadlines at every Canadian university. Yet just a week later Beil, then 23, was on his way to Bond University, a law school in Australia that actively targets and recruits Canadian students.

Five years later, Beil — now completing his articling at a Vancouver law firm — is one of a growing number of future lawyers who are going abroad for their legal education. In 2007, 562 foreign-trained graduates applied to the National Committee on Accreditation, requesting the right to practice in Canada, up from 225 in 1999. If current trends continue, that number could grow by 200 applicants in as few as three years, according to Vern Krishna, a University of Ottawa law professor and former Treasurer of the Law Society of Upper Canada.

Bond is, by far, Canada’s most popular overseas law program. Since its founding in 1987, Australia’s first private university has geared its law program to attract Canadians. More than 140 are currently enrolled—making Bond’s population of Canadian law students almost as large as that of the University of Calgary’s faculty of law. Students meet fellow Canadians through the Canadian Law Students Association and study with visiting profs from the University of Saskatchewan, the University of Manitoba, and the University of Western Ontario. They can even study Canadian constitutional law (Canadian corporate law courses are in the works, too) and get credit from the University of Manitoba. To top it off, it all takes place on a campus in the suburbs of Gold Coast, Queensland, a lush paradise that is a hybrid between Miami Beach and Waikiki.

Victoria Heron, a manager with student recruitment agency AustraLearn, says there are three primary reasons students choose Bond: to get through law school faster (a law degree at Bond takes only two years, not three), to gain international experience—and because they weren’t accepted at a Canadian law school. Eric Colvin, a Bond professor and former dean who used to teach at the University of Saskatchewan, says that two-thirds of graduates return to Canada to practice law and most have no problem finding jobs and articling positions. “The students say that they are able to get employment,” he says. “The fact that they have got their law degree from somewhere like Australia makes them somewhat exotic and interesting creatures and law firms are very willing to see what they’ve got to offer.”

Beil thinks his global outlook gave him an edge when applying for articling positions. “A lot of the Canadian law grads have never worked. They have never done anything,” he says. “In this market, employers just want to see something different. I got out there and saw the world and it makes me way more interesting.” But among his peers at the University of Toronto where he later completed a second law degree, Beil had to fight Bond’s stigma as Last Chance U. “The appearance of Bond to a lot of people in Canada is that the school will let anybody under the sun in,” he says. “People say, ‘You went to Bond because you couldn’t get in anywhere else. You’re not as smart as the rest of us.’ It’s simply not true.”

Court judgments are some of the best literature you’ll find in Canada

Does anyone here know much about Bora Laskin? Probably not. And yet he was one of only a handful of people who has left an indelible imprint on Canadian society. If you were to trounce down to Bay Street, or to Osgoode Hall, or to Flavelle House off Queens Park, you would find small communities that worship the man, almost as a saint. But out in the general public? Not a chance.

Laskin was Canada’s Chief Justice from 1973 to 1984. It has been said by many that he was the first great Chief Justice this country knew. In the recent book, The Laskin Legacy: Essays in Commemoration of Chief Justice Bora Laskin, Irwin Law has published an intriguing hagiography of the man. Edited by Neil Finklestein and Constance Backhouse, the collection is based on speeches from a symposium in honour of the great judge held in 2005.

Now, be careful. Though the book has a diverse set of perspectives on Laskin – we learn about his underprivileged upbringing in Thunder Bay, we learn about his impact on the court, we learn about his belief in a strong federal government – it is meant solely for an audience of legal professionals and academics. If you are anything less than comfortable with such terms as “constructive trusts” and “fiduciary duties”, this book is, sadly, not for you.

Perhaps this reveals a greater problem. Anyone exiting one of Canada’s twenty law faculties could probably write a detailed essay (with proper citation, no less) on this great legal mind. But he is, at best, an obscurity to others.

This need not be the case. The writings of our country’s great judges can be as powerful as political tracts and as evocative as great literature. But because lawyers alone read the judgments of our courts, the public is kept ignorant of some truly great writing. True, certain Supreme Court decisions involving tariffs, income tax rates or land use planning can be highly technical and, thus, boring. Yet much of what Laskin wrote (and nearly all of what his successor as Chief Justice, Brian Dickson, wrote) contains flashes of brilliance: prose that can judged alongside the works of Burke, Mill and Arendt.

Look at the Americans. Their Supreme Court has a halloed place within the pantheon of collective myth. Their fourth Chief Justice, John Marshall, is revered as the founder of a truly independent judiciary. Earl Warren, who was Chief Justice throughout the turbulent sixties, is known for his progressive stance on civil rights and desegregation. And, today, the extremist philosophy of the originalist Antonin Scalia is known – and feared – by much of the decidedly “liberal” media.

In Canada, however, the personalities on the court don’t receive the same coverage. Perhaps, with far fewer lawyers per capita, we have less of a legal culture. People here are also much less litigious.

But we need not reserve some of the country’s great writing to its judges and lawyers. Especially not since the Charter of Rights and Freedoms affects everyone equally. The notions of justice, of individual rights and of the collective good should become part of our overall discourse. My challenge to Irwin Law, then, is to publish a book not aimed at law faculties and firms, but rather at the general reading public, to let Canadians know about the rich culture of legal writing that exists on their doorstep.

This post was first published on Open Book: Toronto’s Writers in Residence page on May 10, 2008.