University of Toronto Faculty of Law

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University of Toronto Faculty of Law
Established 1887
Type Public
Dean Mayo Moran
Students 560 (approx.)
Location Toronto, Canada
Campus Urban
Website www.law.utoronto.ca

Established in 1887, the University of Toronto Faculty of Law is one of the oldest professional faculties at the University of Toronto and one of the leading law schools in Canada.

The law school is highly-regarded in the areas of corporate law, law and economics, and legal theory, and graduates of the law school practice at Toronto's leading Bay Street law firms and law firms in New York and London. According to statistics published in the Official Guide to Canadian Law Schools by the Law School Admission Council, the median undergraduate GPA of accepted students is 3.8 (84%), and the median LSAT score is 167 (95th percentile), making it the most selective in Canada and among the most selective in North America. The University of Toronto Law School offers its students Canada's most extensive internship program in pro bono work and international human rights law, and supports a range of legal clinics staffed by students.

Flavelle House. The other law school building is Falconer Hall.
Flavelle House. The other law school building is Falconer Hall.
The extension to Flavelle House which houses, amongst others, the Bora Laskin library.
The extension to Flavelle House which houses, amongst others, the Bora Laskin library.

Tuition fees for entering Juris Doctor students were set at $16,000 in 2005-06, and will increase to $17,280 (excluding incidental/ancillary fees) in 2006-07. Although the law school has the highest tuition of any law school in Canada, the law school also has a generous financial aid program which allows approximately 40 students to attend tuition-free each year. More than 1/2 of the student body receives financial aid on the basis of assessed need, predominantly in the form of bursaries and interest-free loans. The law school is the only one in Canada with a back-end debt relief program for graduates who accept low income employment.

The Faculty of Law was the first law school in Canada to offer the Juris Doctor degree (J.D.) instead of the Bachelor of Laws (LL.B). The J.D. designation is intended to reflect the fact that the vast majority of the law school’s graduates enter the law school with at least one university degree (approximately one-quarter enter with one or more graduate degrees). The J.D. designation does not reflect significant changes in the law school's curriculum.

Today, the law school has over 60 full-time faculty members, and 500 undergraduate and graduate students, giving it a student-faculty ratio of approximately 9:1, one of the lowest in North America. The law school's "Distinguished Visitors" program brings 15-25 short-term visiting professors from the world's leading law schools to teach at the school each year.

Although the University of Toronto's Faculty of Law was established in 1887, it was not until 1949 that the law school took its modern form. In the 1940s, the Faculty played the leading role in making legal education in Ontario into a modern academic degree course, rather than an apprenticeship.

In 1949, Cecil (“Caesar”) Wright assumed the deanship of U of T's law school. He first had to resign his post as Dean of Osgoode Hall Law School, the seat of the Law Society of Upper Canada, rejecting the Law Society's apprenticeship model of legal education in favour of the University of Toronto's vision of a full-time legal education, hinging on the professional bachelor of laws degree and centred in a university. Wright brought with him his colleagues John Willis and Bora Laskin (who later became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada).

Despite the law school's academic program, the Law Society of Upper Canada refused to recognize the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto as a degree-granting institution for the purposes of accreditation. In the early 1950s, law students and their supporters petitioned the Law Society, and in 1953, a group of 50 student protesters marched on Osgoode Hall demanding recognition for the Faculty of Law. Finally, in 1958, after years of negotiation and discord, the Law Society began to give credit to graduates of the law school seeking admission to the Ontario bar.

The school is located in the middle of the University of Toronto at the corner of Queen's Park Crescent and Hoskin Street, just south of the Royal Ontario Museum.

As reported on CTV, 25 students at the law school were alleged to have inflated their grades during applications to law firms for summer jobs in 2001. These allegations were investigated and a number of students were subsequently disciplined by the University.

The current Dean is Professor Mayo Moran, appointed in December 2005.

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