The Canadian Legal Profession

This article seeks to weave together the limited information available on the legal professions of the Canadian provinces. Following the same general format as the other comparative studies in this series, it also offers several critical observations of special interest to readers in the United States, whose experience the Canadian bar so closely tracks. The phenomenon of stratification—familiar to American observers—is clearly visible in the Canadian legal profession. Combined with other centrifugal forces, it threatens the unity of a profession which, until recently, has managed to preserve a high degree of cohesion in training, ideology, and institutional structures. On the other hand, in certain respects, the Canadian experience seems to differ from that of the United States, especially in the strength and peculiar structure of publicly funded legal aid schemes, in the profession's continuing formal autonomy and relative immunity from public regulation, and in its long-lasting attachment to apprenticeship as a necessary stage in professional formation. These and other convergences and divergences between the two countries raise questions of general significance: To what extent do the similarities between Canada and the United States verify the assumption implicit in the theoretical literature (principally Abel, Freidson, and Larson) that there is an empirical referent for something called legal professionalism? And to what extent do the differences suggest that containing societies contribute distinctive characteristics to their legal professions, whose qualities are therefore highly contingent?