list of law schools in Canada

A number of law schools in Canada operate as a faculty or as an affiliated school to a Canadian public university. Twenty law schools offer common law schooling, whereas seven schools offer schooling in the civil law system. Although the judicial system in most Canadian provinces operate under a common law system, the province of Quebec uses the civil law system for private law matters. As a result, most Canadian law schools that offer schooling in civil law are based in Quebec. Legal education in Canada Generally, entry into law programs in Canada is based primarily on a combination of the student's previous grades as well as, for English-language common-law programs, their score on the Law School Admission Test (LSAT). Factors such as specialized degrees, work experience, community involvement, personal character, extracurricular activities, and references are sometimes taken into account, for which the Universities of Calgary, Windsor and McGill's holistic law school admissions are well known, but the LSAT remains far more determinative of admission than comparable standardized tests for other disciplines, such as the MCAT or GMAT. Quebec law schools, including the dual-curriculum, bilingual McGill University Faculty of Law, do not require applicants to write the LSAT, although any scores are generally taken into account; nor do the French-language common-law programs at the Université de Moncton École de droit and University of Ottawa Faculty of Law. All of Canada's law schools are affiliated with public universities, and are thus public institutions. This practice has been held to have helped reduce disparities in the quality of students and instruction as between the schools. 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.