Categories: Canada

Toronto and McGill lead the law school rankings

How successful are grads in landing top jobs? How often is faculty members’ work recognized by other academics?

by macleans.ca on Thursday, September 16, 2010 9:00am - 24 Comments

Maclean’s law school rankings assess graduates and faculty on key output measures. How successful are grads in landing top jobs? How often is faculty members’ work recognized by other academics?

Common Law Schools ranking
OVERALL RANK			GRADUATE QUALITY				FACULTY QUALITY
		Rank Last Year	Elite Firm Hiring	National Reach	Supreme Court Clerkships	Faculty Hiring	Faculty Journal Citations
1	Toronto	(1)	1	4	2	1	2
2	Osgoode	(2*)	10	1*	8	7*	1
3	McGill	(2*)	3	6*	1	2	6
4	Queen’s	(6)	12	1*	9*	4	3*
5	UBC	(4)	11	12	6*	6	5
6	Dalhousie	(7)	8	5	5	3	7
7	Victoria	(5)	14	11	4	7*	3*
8	Western	(10)	5*	1*	12*	9*	9
9	Ottawa	(8)	13	9*	3	12*	8
10	Alberta	(9)	7	8	9*	9*	10*
11	Saskatchewan	(12)	5*	13	9*	5	13
*12	Calgary	(11)	9	9*	12*	16	10*
*12	New Brunswick	(13)	2	16	6*	11	15
14	Manitoba	(13*)	4	14	12*	12*	14
15	Windsor	(15)	15	6*	15*	12*	12
16	Moncton	(16)	16	15	15*	12*	16

Civil Law Schools Ranking
1	McGill	(N/A)	1	2	1	1	1
2	Montréal	(1)	2	1	4*	2	2
3	Laval	(3)	3	5	4*	3*	3
4	Ottawa	(2)	4*	3	2*	3*	4
*5	UQAM	(4*)	6	6	2*	6	5
*5	Sherbrooke	(4*)	4*	4	4*	5	6

The law rankings are comprised of two separate rankings: one for common law schools—the law of Anglo tradition and most provinces; and one for civil law schools—a law tradition practised in Quebec. Civil and common law schools were evaluated according to the same criteria.

Two universities appear in both the common and civil law school rankings: Ottawa and McGill. The University of Ottawa’s faculty of law offers two distinct streams, civil and common. Two different sets of numbers were used for the calculations of the two rankings. McGill’s faculty of law occupies a unique position in that it offers a fully integrated common and civil law program. As such, the same set of data was used in calculating the common and civil law rankings.

*Indicates a tie

Tags: Canada's best professional schools 2010, education, Law, McGill, professional schools, professional schools ranking, Toronto

Minautaure

I must protest vehemently, this study is absolute horse
manure when it comes to the Civil Law Schools Ranking.

McGill students themselves will tell you there's no way they rank higher than
UdeM or Sherbrooke in civil law. Proof of that is those 2 schools consistently
share the top two spotsin Quebec Bar School exam results. Those grueling
tests crafted by lawyers to torture aspiring colleagues.

What better standings can there be than the actual Quebec Bar exam results?

-A proud graduate of both UdeM and the Sorbonne

Impossibly_ironic

This is the sort of shallow response you might cynically expect a non-reflective CCQ-trained lawyer to give. This response captures, ironically, exactly what is wrong with this view of legal education. Q.E.D.

Minautaure

Props on gratuitously insinuating I lack the faculty to reflect on the value of my own legal training.

For the sake of healthy, knowledgeable debate, please endulge me by listing just a few McGill
professors who have written treaties on civil law which are actually considered as cornerstones
in their fields. What's the matter? Cat got your tongue? So let's try this for a change. Please refresh
my memory as to when McGill students last won a legal competition in the Civil Law field.

Let me help see the light. More UdeM Law graduates have gone on to become Prime Ministers,
Premiers and Supreme Court Justices than McGill graduates. Yet you hear less and less about
our faculty's prowess in the English media or abroad.

Do me a favor, step aside and let those of us who have worked for it get their dues.

And for the record, I also hold a JD in Common Law.

Minautaure

Interestingly enough, McGill entered the Civil Law Ranking at #1.
Can someone please explain this to me? I'm simply flabberghasted.

Mike T.

They used the same ranking as for the common law schools, which are geared towards cross-country criteria. Civl law grads won't be working in new york (or outside Quebec really) or clerking at the SCC, so the only school that does both is going to have an enormous advantage.
Serge

Why wouldn't McGill enter the Civil Law Ranking at #1? It's the first year Macleans ranked them there, but they have been teaching the civil law and awarding civil law degrees since 1848. You'd think they'd have picked up a thing or two since then.

Serge

The most recent dean, Kasirer, was the editor of the best CCQ compilation and was recently elevated directly to the Court of Appeal. Jobin is co-author of Obligations, one of Quebec's single most influential texts. Jutras helped run the transition to the new CCQ and was the in-house lawyer for the Supreme Court of Canada before returning to teaching. Madeleine Cantin-Cumyn is Quebec's leading authority on the fiducie. MacDonald drafted the portions of the CCQ dealing with security over movables. All that said, the rankings for "civil law" schools clearly reflect the overall legal education provided to practice within a civil law system, not simply the subset of the law that is private civil law. Public law, federal law, international law, and so forth: a Crépeau on immigration law, Knoppers on biomedical ethics, Bachand or Belley on international commercial arbitration, or Akhavan on public international law are clearly teaching areas of law that are no more related to a "civil law" than to a "common law" school per se, as these are simply areas of practice that are not part of the area of the law that falls into this distinction in Canada.

Minautaure

Funny that you should mention dean Jutras, who often jokes he was turned down by McGill for his legl studies. Equally funny that you should mention Crepeau and Knoppers, recent recruits FROM UdeM for reasons mostly having to do with financial/material means that McGill was able to offer and that UdeM wasn't.

Yes indeed, this is the kind of ranking we want. One that puts McGill right at the top of the Civil Law Schools despite the reality that most of their students will go on to practice elsewhere or in other fields than Quebec civil law.

http://www.mcgill.ca/law Kirk

Minautaure's criticism of McGill law on the basis of their students not doing as well on the Quebec Bar is misleading. It suggests that the best way to evaluate a law school is according to its students' performance on the bar. But this is incorrect. The Bar exam tests factual, yes/no kinds of answers, more so than anything else. A good legal education depends on more than the mere ability to do well on a Bar exam. How about creativity, reading comprehension, logical skills, writing ability, the ability to construct complicated and convicing legal arguments, and the ability to find creative solutions to legal problems.

But of course the best explanation for McGill students doing poorly on the Quebec bar exam is that it is offered only in French and McGill students are mostly English (as is the programme itself).

Minautaure

With all due respect to Kirk, he must've passed the Bar many decades ago because
the Quebec Bar's current two day exam is a tough, broadbased type of exam which tests
subjects on the combination of many legal skills. In short, it's worlds away from yes/no
(high school level) questions.

The bottom line is that the McGill Law Faculty is an elitist school. It has way less students
and way more funding. Kind of like a private school. You can't exactly compare it to other
schools which have a much larger student population.

Also, for the record, a lot of the courses at McGill are offered in French.
I still say there's no way McGill is the number one civil law school in Canada.

Many of my friends are happy to have attended McGill Law School.
I still wouldn't trade my experience at UdeM for anything.

Bourque, Max

Miniautaure, your arguments are full of emotional responses which do not help you.
"Many of my friends are happy to have attended McGill Law School. I still wouldn't trade my experience at UdeM for anything"
you have discredited your argument because you have stated based on your experience, not on the actual finesse of the university.
"The bottom line is that the McGill Law Faculty is an elitist school. It has way less students and way more funding. Kind of like a private school. You can't exactly compare it to other schools which have a much larger student population."
Please explain how this helps you? Quality not quantity friend. Who gives a hoot if a school has say 30,000 students if most of them end up being mediocre compared to the school with 7,000.
"With all due respect to Kirk, he must've passed the Bar many decades ago because the Quebec Bar's current two day exam is a tough, broadbased type of exam which tests subjects on the combination of many legal skills"
With all due respect you are lacking. Have you taken the Bar every year for the past few decades? This statement implies that you know for a fact that the Bar has not had the yes/no form for that time. Toughness is also a matter of opinion, i.e. my classmates find exams terribly difficult at my level whereas I can breeze through them and have time to read the Iliad before the exam is over.
Really, you have legal training, yet your arguments are very flawed, perhaps if you are the standard of measurement this is the reason McGill is superior to other Civil Law Schools.

Minautaure

wow really? Max, I don't spend much time crafting my responses.
I'd be happy to but I find better things to do with my time.

As a student representative, I fought hard to have the Bar change it's exam format because
spending a mandatory full academic year in Bar School felt antiquated to most of us students
at the time. As such, I have an a intimate knowledge of the format of exams in the last decade.
The format was finally changed, but alas, they only made the exam more intense, ergo harder.

P.S.: Your message only served to illustrate my point that although McGill Law's student body
isn't composed entirely of elitist elements, it certainly has it's fair share of pompous jerks.
I certainly hope we cross paths in a court room. We'll see then who has the superior skill set.

kancho

UdeM and McGill Law are definitely top civil law schools. That there is little doubt. However, the ranking regarding McGill's current ranking in Civil law is misleading since data was not split between common law and civil law components. This skews the results towards McGill's favor for the following reasons:

1. Advantage in Elite Firm Hiring
McGill's potential market is unfairly larger due to its access to the common law world. UdeM has a strong presence in Elite firm hiring in Quebec, perhaps higher than McGill, but has practically no presence in the common law world.

2. Faculty Journal Citations
McGill's faculty publishes in both common law and civil law. Again, McGill potential reach is larger than UdeM

The two measures obviously favor McGill as long as both common law and civil law components are gauged together. However there is no doubt that McGill places better when it comes to SCC clerkships and Faculty Hiring.

Maybe McGill really is #1, but this should be supported by reliable data.

Panther Dash

My main problem with these rankings is the overall focus on "elite firms," which make up 30% of the total when you include "national reach." The problem here is that a lot of us don't want to slave away 60-70 hours a week for god knows what kind of purpose. It's degrading, soulless work. It also pays, very, very well. If you'll ignore my editorializing (some of you might not think your work is soulless, and some of you might be right), you can at least see my point that this is a narrow view of 'graduate quality.' A lot of us know very good students and otherwise great potential lawyers who have zero interest in that line of work.
A lot of people have recommended including a measure of how many graduates actually get articles- that's a good alternative. A survey of student satisfaction would also be good- as this controls for whatever law students go to school looking for- big law lawyers, 'cause' lawyers, government lawyers, and eventual graduates who don't practice law but are glad they went to law school. Methodologically, though, it's easier to find big-firm lawyers, since they're more likely to have easily found websites, so I can see why they do it this way.

With all of these problems (and many more), I really hope no one is putting to much credibility in these numbers- especially you aspiring law students. This would be a terrible metric on which to base a decision of which school to attend. It tells you something, sure- but it's pretty limited beyond which schools a) have students looking to practice for gigantic corporate firms and b) which schools are preferred by those firms. By accident, it also comes up with a reasonable but highly imperfect ranking of all the schools.

Serge

Oh, it doesn't even pay all that well. If your starting premise is a bright, capable person willing to do slave away doing soulless work, that person can do a lot better at one of the financial clients their firm is acting for. Trust me.

DDV

I think an addition of class profiles also should be included in this ranking. I'd hate to have the same result as in the States where admissions becomes a numbers based arms race, however I think there is something to be said about having an enhanced educational quality from having a multitude of bright minds in the class. U of T's most recent entering class has a median GPA of 3.85 and a median LSAT 168. Those numbers are very high, and speak volumes about the kids that are in those classes, and their capabilities as students. That scholastic ability is going to translate, to a certain extent, into a level of competition amongst peers and ability of professors to push their students that is beneficial to the overall level of education that will come out of that school. Seems only logical to add that criteria, in ranking a law schools.
Law Person

What’s wrong about the Elite Firm Hiring ranking is the absurd definition of “elite firm”. Is a firm that pays articling students a salary of $40k in New Brunswick really as “elite” as a firm that pays $70k in Toronto and that works on big deals and big litigation? The majority of Canada’s “elite firms” are in Toronto, and the rest are split among Calgary, Vancouver, Ottawa and Montreal. The method of using so many regions, giving equal weight to each region, and then only looking at a few firms in each region (and only five in NY!) just doesn’t make sense.

Additionally, it probably makes more sense to look at the number of summer and/or articling students at the elite firms, not the associates. Everyone in the legal profession knows that schools can get you an in as a student, but after that it’s all about experience and reputation. Also, many lawyers have articled at big-name firms and then made the personal decision to leave either immediately or after a couple of years as an associate.
Amy Stern

How come everybody is putting down law school rankings. It is what it is. There is so much more information to find out when considering a law school and besides it's interesting to see where each school ranks.
law student

Here's information about the real "Elite Firm Hiring": http://lawstats.xtreemhost.com/index.php
http://twitter.com/tardbug Shanda

Rather than basing the ranking on faculty JOURNAL citations you should consider faculty SUPREME COURT citations – there is a lot more clout in the latter

Loomislewis

Just a general observation:

Just because even a BAC at Sorbonne (talk about elitist name dropping!) was obviously not enough to make the cut and get yourself accepted at McGill so as to continue your education at the most prestigious of schools on the globe, Minautar [sic], your “sour grapes” reaction to having been REJECTED by McGill as is so patently obvious is very unbecoming.

I wonder where you took your Sorbonne and U de M degrees and applied to get your JD “fix” at some prestigious American Law School?

Harvard? Yale?

(Definitely not SUNY! Where’s the prestige in that!)

(Then again if it was Ivy League, he definitely woulda “name dropped” there…quite the brain teaser…) ;)

(BTW Shanda, I’m class of ’08…your name and face are familiar…)

Loomislewis

“McGill students themselves will tell you there’s no way they rank higher than
UdeM or Sherbrooke in civil law.”

Speak for yourself. The CCLC was WRITTEN as a collaboration by MCGILL Chancellor Charles Dewey along with Augustin-Norbert Morin and René-Édouard Caron and has produced the likes of Supreme Court Justices Gonthier, Binnie, Deschamps, Fish, LeDain, de Grandpre, Abbot, Rinfret, Mignault and Girouard, along with PMs Laurier (the dude on the $5 Bill) and the aforementioned Abbot.

Note some of the names there…Day, Binnie, Fish, Abbot and Rinfret…sound kinda Anglo to you, y’think?

Has it occurred to you that a possible factor in the high failing rate is due to the fact that the Quebec Bar Exams are required to be written in French, which might make it a bit tougher for some of the Anglo students not perfectly fluent in the Quebec’s make-believe “de jure” yet in no realistic shape or form “de facto” official language?

I wonder just how well francophone students studying “Le Droit Commun” in French at the University of Moncton in NB fare when writing the English Language Ontario Bar Exams, or the pass rate of McGill Law’s substantial francophone student body…

- A Proud ANGLOPHONE Graduate of McGill BA/MBA/BCL/LLB, born and raised in a province where my first language is technically a “foreign language”.
Loomislewis

For the sake of healthy, knowledgeable debate, please endulge me by listing just a few McGill professors who have written treaties on civil law which are actually considered as cornerstones in their fields.I’d say the CCLC, written in part by Chancellor Day might qualify, wouldn’t you?Or Briely & McDonald’s oft cited “Bible” when it comes to a thorough analysis of the Code in the form of doctrine cited by the SCC too many times to count…or the McGill Law Journal…just to cite a few…cat’s nowhere near MY tongue!(Come to think of it, I can’t recall a single prominent U de M grunt I’ve come across often enough to remember…Beaudoin maybe…?)
Loomislewis

Sour grapes for not getting into McGill after the Sorbonne, Amy…use your McGill head…it’s just too obvious…