Welcome!
Raising The Bar is a group of Canadians studying law at universities in the United States. We all hope to return home to Canada to practise law after completing our legal education. However, the Law Society of Upper Canada's restrictive rules regarding foreign legal education make it difficult for foreign trained law students to gain entrance to the bar. We believe graduates of ABA-approved law schools should be given equal access to the Ontario bar admission process.
Before a foreign educated candidate may write the bar exam they face lengthy, expensive requirements, ranging from additional exams to 1-3 semesters at a Canadian law school. These requirements effectively deter well-educated students wishing to return to Canada to practise.
There are persuasive reasons for the LSUC to remove these obstacles, most centrally that:
- Graduates of ABA-approved law schools are educated equivalently to graduates of Canadian law schools;
- Law schools in both Canada and the United States feature similar teaching methods and philosophies, similar skill development, and similarly high standards;
- Current Ontario bar admission regulations discriminate against ABA-educated law students; removing these restrictions would raise the quality of service in the Ontario legal market; and
- Graduates of most common law schools are given open access to the New York bar, and New York legal practice thrives under this policy.
We strongly believe that facilitating the admission of equivalently educated law graduates would be a beneficial policy change for the LSUC. Moreover, we believe that this is the right thing to do. Canadian students like us, pursuing a legal education at top ABA-schools, are interested in the opportunity to practise law in Canada, and should be able to.
Please take a few minutes to navigate our website to learn more about this issue. In particular, our position paper details the problem with the existing regulations, the proposed changes, and their justifications. Should you have any questions or suggestions, or wish to get involved, please contact us!