What a******y.
No Canadian school is ABA approved. If you go to a Canadian school it may not be possible to go back to many places in the states.
In the event that you end up graduating with only a UBC degree, the Mass. and N.Y. bar exams do remain open to you. Anyone with any kind of law degree from any country is free to try (and fail) to pass the N.Y. and Massachusetts state bar exams. California used to be the same way, but I hear that that's changed in recent years; so without an ABA-approved J.D. you're pretty much limited to N.Y. and Mass,
unless you go on to earn an American LL.M. (something many Canadian law students go on to do anyway).
That automatically opens up about 20 other states, one of which is definitely California (I don't know if Ohio is one or not). And, of course, you can always get your Master's from a T14. Failing that, you may need to put in a few years of practice somewhere else before you can practice in a given state. In general, practicing in the U.S. with a Canadian degree can be accomplished more easily than practicing in Canada with a U.S. degree.
There are no 160k jobs in Canada at all. Biglaw in Canada starts at 50k/yr to article in Vancouver, and goes up to 90k/yr the year later.
For what it's worth, it's also much less stressful, competitive, and dehumanizing.
Going to a school in a foreign country because you don't want to live in Ohio anymore is retarded. Law school is not a vacation.
Really? Because the UBC/Hawaii joint program, with two years in Van and two in Honolulu, sound like a
hell of a great vacation to me!
If you have T30 numbers, do you really want a U of Hawaii JD on your resume? That is not a strong law school, and there are few jobs in its home market.
True, but:
UBC is probably the 4th or 5th best school in Canada.
And it is, for law (though all Canadian law schools are extremely well regarded by Canadian employers; there are no TTTs up here); as just a University, it's generally ranked 3rd (behind Toronto and McGill). This should enable it to do some heavy lifting in other markets: I think that, for example, with the ABA-approved J.D. from Hawaii making you eligible to practice in the Northwest, the UBC J.D. would still look very good on a resume up there, where they would know of it by reputation. Being able to deal with cross-border issues might even be a real asset in a place like Seattle.
The program to compare this to is the Windsor/Detroit Mercy program, and I think it's far superior. Hawaii, as a school, just seems hampered by a crazy location, while Mercy is a
bad school in a bad location; the former location is also a tropical paradise, while the latter is a crime-ridden industrial wasteland. And, while all Canadian law schools are equally portable in Canada, and fall more or less in the statistical range of the top 100 U.S. schools, Windsor is sort of at the bottom of the food chain up here. Certainly as a university it's nothing UBC in terms of research, facilities, or international reputation.
I think there are all kinds of reasons that Hawaii grads don't place well outside of Hawaii that have nothing to do with the quality of the school. I have a friend who earned her professional doctorate in architecture there (their program is the only one of it's kind in the world), and she described it in very positive terms. Their law school is the most ethnically diverse in the United States, and they have a strong social justice mandate to helping the indigenous people of Hawaii. I'd be proud to have a degree from there. The school has done a lot to earn the respect of the island community, although these same efforts may be cast in a negative light for outsiders, for all the wrong reasons. But combining the Hawaii degree with a degree from a generally well-regarded school like UBC allows you to potentially negate a lot of these false perceptions. I don't think you should be concerned about the Hawaii "market", just ABA accreditation.
But if you do plan on going back to the US it might be hard as UBC alumnia are all mainly located in BC with maybe some in Asia
Uuh, maybe
lots in Asia. Maybe a
ridiculous number in Asia. Seriously, you have no idea how many Asian students are there: the University of Toronto was swarming with them when I went there, and by all accounts UBC has twice as many. "Elite" Canadian schools have a major advantage over their American "peers" in that they generally admit many times as many undergraduates and charge a fraction of the tuition. I'd say that UBC probably has a bigger alumni network in China than all but a handful of top American schools (they have a joint program in law with UHK for heaven's sake!)
I have to say that if I were in your shoes I’d totally do the UBC/Hawaii thing; I’d be starting it next year, in fact, if I’d gotten into UBC (but I’m off to Alberta instead).
