Institutional Cultures and Legal Education at Select Canadian Law Faculties (DCL Thesis, McGill University)

Abstract

This dissertation is an exploration of the uniqueness of Canadian law Faculties as sites of meanings about legal education. Through an empirical study, it aims to tease out the institutional cultures of three law teaching institutions: the Legal Sciences Department at the University of Quebec in Montreal, the Faculty of Law at the University of Alberta and the Faculty of Law at the University of Moncton. The thesis notably focuses on the goals they each attribute to legal education, the structures surrounding it and its academic modalities. The findings show that each Faculty associates to such elements a set of meanings experienced as core to their self-conception, enduring through time and distinguishing them from others. Each Faculty thus constitutes a unique community of significations in resonance with its history, social environment and changing membership, even when accounting for the internal contestation and evolution of such meanings about legal education. This thesis builds on the insights of previous works showing that law professors experience their Faculty’s institutional cultures as endowed with normative force and sketch out the content of such cultural norms at the three case studies. It then examines how these same Faculties are engaging with the prominent challenge posed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Call to Action 28 to further tease out their culture as well as demonstrate their relevance to improve our understanding of law Faculties’ responses to common contemporary challenges. The substantive and detailed engagement with the plural realities of legal education in Canada in this thesis aims to awaken the assumptions legal educators entertain about the goals and modalities of legal education and broaden their horizons of possibilities.

Keywords: legal education; socio-legal studies; empirical studies; comparative law; legal history