Canadian Law School Rankings

Written by Matthew Scott

Unlike in the United States, where Law School rankings are fairly common, this has never really taken hold within the context of Canadian society. Certainly, for the vast majority of university programs in Canada, ranking is done by certain magazines, but the perception of the general public does not always mesh with what the rankings state. Consequently, the importance of going to a school ranked “1st” v. “5th”, might be largely irrelevant.

In general, when determining where to go to school in Canada, a better consideration would be examining the region, programs and quality of life. Doing this will allow you to be more successful within the school you choose to attend, and therefore you will achieve better grades and be more successful in finding employment.

That said, in November 2007, Macleans Magazine issued their first annual Canadian Law School rankings.  However, their rankings are not designed to measure the hardest schools to get into, but instead, the quality of output for each school. To do this, Macleans employed professor Brian Leiter, who worked for the University of Texas at Austin Law School. Over the years, he has for many years criticized the U.S. News and World Report rankings methodology, which has data that is open to manipulation and in some cases, even if accurate, may not be relevant.

Using the advice of Professor Leiter, Macleans (www.macleans.com) developed a ranking system which they believe is relevant and unbiased in its assessment of Canadian Law Schools. Utilizing four elements, all drawn from public data, Macleans assigns half the weight in the rankings to the student and graduate quality, and the other half to a measure of faculty quality. The former is comprised of “Elite Firm Hiring”, “National Reach” and “Supreme Court Clerkships”, while the latter is made of “Faculty Journal Citations”. These rankings are done for both Common Law (all provinces except Québec) and Civil Law (mostly Québec).

Explanation of Categories

Faculty Journal Citations:
Weighted at 50% of the rankings, the number of tenure and tenure-track faculty was counted at each school, excluding adjunct faculty, emeritus professors and etc. Each professor’s citation count in Quicklaw’s database of 33 Canadian legal journals was then tallied, and added to the school’s total citation count. This value was then divided by the number of professors at each school.

Elite Firm Hiring:
This measure is worth 25% of a schools ranking, relied on the Lexpert list of the leading Canadian law firms and Vault’s list of the leading New York firms. On each firm’s website, the number of associates from each school was counted, divided by the size of each school’s first-year class, as outlined on the Law School Admission Council website.

National Reach:
Worth only 15% of the ranking, this value was derived from the elite firm hiring, except, in this case it was calculated using how many of each school’s graduates were hired from leading firms other than the top three firms to hire graduates from school. In effect, the point of this measure was to attempt to measure the extent to which leading firms outside of a school’s region hire its graduates, since students prefer a degree that is marketable across the country.

Supreme Court Clerkships:
The final measure, worth only 10% of the ranking, is derived from the number of Supreme Court clerks hired over the past six years, and the number from each school. Each of these positions are one year positions, generally awarded to the nation’s top students, as chosen by the judges. The source used was Osgoode Hall’s The Court website (www.thecourt.ca/clerks-of-the-supreme-court).

Using these 4 ranking criteria, Macleans calculated an overall ranking.  This ranking as well as the rankings within each category are provided below.