Legal Commentary

Many esteemed bloggers on this site have had interesting cross-border experiences between law schools in the United States and law schools in Canada. I'm very curious to explore this difference on a variety of axes - teaching, classroom culture, scholarship, the job market.

Many of you, like me, are or were northern imports in the South (Dan  Markel and Paul Horwitz come immediately to mind). Many have been to Canadian law schools and now teach in the U.S. Many have visited at Canadian law schools. Some teach in joint degree programs with Canadian law schools.

In this first post - the classroom - I'm curious to know whether or not others have felt a palpable difference between classroom experiences in American law schools and classroom experiences in Canadian law schools. Some questions which have consistently piqued my interest are:

1. Are student expectations the same on both sides of the border?
2. Do students expect the same or different classroom experiences from their professors?
3. What about the split between doctrinal teaching and theory in the classroom? Is one country more or less tolerant of introducing theory than the other?
4. Are American or Canadian students more or less active in class participation? Is Socratic methodology alive on both sides of the border? Passive versus active learning methodologies?
5. Do American or Canadian students comparatively feel more or less empowered to challenge the assumptions of their respective legal systems? Do they question ratio of cases?
6. Finally, how much of a role does individual politics play in the legal education system of the respective countries, as played out in the classroom? (i.e. are there "righties" and "lefties" in class, or not?)

Curious to know the thoughts of many of my cross-border prawf compadres. Can we put our finger on any cross-border cultural differences? If so, why?