Legal Research

Not Enough Lawyers?

By Simon Fodden

In one ear we hear the news that thanks to the recession firms are laying off lawyers and hiring fewer; and today in the other ear McLeans tells us that Canada needs more lawyers than its law schools can produce. According to the article, “Where’s a lawyer when you need one?” by Kate Lunau, Canada has fewer law schools for its population than any other Commonwealth country. Lunau explores some of the constraints — provincial refusal to fund new law schools being prime among them — and depends on Vern Krishna’s analysis to a large degree.

It might be that there is an unfulfilled demand for non-corporate lawyers, especially in smaller towns and rural areas. It’s not clear to me, though, that increasing the number of law graduates significantly would alleviate that sort of problem. I suspect there’s a bind here: taking the view of legal education as a professional training course, controlled entry can make sense (whether or not it’s fair to entrants or the public) to the regulators; but if legal education is viewed as an academic study like any other, there’s no reason whatever to limit admission to law schools, provided that decent teaching can be provided. Of course, legal education carries both cans…

At the end of the article, there’s one comment at the moment: “Where’s a lawyer when you need one? Throw a rock.” The commenter is one David Fraser. Our David Fraser, one wonders?

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on February 02, 2009 (boomark / email).